Schedule of events:
5:00 to 6:00 – Tour of the Evans’s Log Home
6:00 to 6:30 – Refreshments and Social Time
6:30 – Kristen DeGraauw Presentation
What is dendrochronology?
Dendrochronology: The study of temporal and spatial patterns of physical processes through the annual growth rings of trees.
Dendrochronologists study a variety of environmental processes such as forest dynamics (forest fire, forest succession, insect outbreaks), climate (temperature and precipitation variability), past volcanic events. They use tree rings as well.
Dendron: tree
Chronos: time
Ology: the study of
Literally the study of time recorded in tree rings
The unique patterns of growth in tree rings are also used to provide cutting dates for archaeological timbers, including historic log structures; a science known as dendroarchaeology.
Annual tree growth is recorded in the rings of a tree. Years of “good” growth are represented by wide rings and years of “poor” growth are represented by narrow rings. The variability of growth in a tree over time is seen as a pattern of wide and narrow rings that can be “matched” to other trees growing in similar environmental conditions. This process of pattern matching is called “crossdating”.
Methods:
- Collected cores from the logs using hollow drill bits.
- Mounted cores and sanded to display tree rings.
- Measured the width of each ring on each core.
- Visually and statistically matched the patterns of ring width from each core.
- Compared the overall pattern of the cores to living trees throughout the region.
- Used the living tree dates to provide cutting dates for each core.
Results:
Based on the patterns of variability in each core, and the comparison of these cores to living trees in the region, we were able to determine that cutting date for Hemlock House was 1815.
Dendrochronologist Profile
Kristen de Graauw, PhD candidate of Geography at West Virginia University is a trained dendrochronologist and has dated historic log structures both in the eastern and western United States. She is creating a network of tree-ring chronologies from historic logs structures in southeastern West Virginia to broaden the written history of pioneer expansion in West Virginia and explore how forests looked and behaved prior to European settlement in the region.
Learn more about dendrochronology and Graauw’s project by checking out her blog.
www.centralapptimbers.weebly.com