With three years of National Science Foundation support, the principal investigator, Peter Kuniholm, and the Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory will work to finish building an absolutely-dated tree-ring chronology for the Eastern Mediterranean complete back to 3000 BC and possibly to 7000 BC or before. 7500 years' worth of chronologies spanning 9000 years but not yet in a single sequence has already been constructed. Focus will be placed on sample collection from three regions. The first is a large-scale commercial exploitation of Croatian and Bosnian rivers for thousands of stems of subfossil oak, some of which will not only fill sequence gaps but may go back in time to before 10,489 years ago, the present limit of oak chronologies for Northern Europe. The enterprises have agreed to supply slices of all their long-lived material. A second 'target of opportunity' is the unique possibility afforded by the construction of a 39-kilometer-long subway system through the heart of downtown Istanbul. The construction of the tunnel has recently been postponed for a year in order to allow more time for excavation and preservation of some millions of archaeological artifacts, but the completion date for the tunnel is scheduled for four years from now. Archaeological excavations operating in three 8-hour shifts per day in the excavation for the main train station - at Yenikapý at present 800 meters x 400 meters x 25 meters deep - have so far penetrated through a long series of Ottoman, Byzantine, and late Roman levels, and in one segment as far back as the Neolithic where recently wattle-and-daub fishermen's huts from the 6th millennium BC were unearthed. In the past three years Kuniholm's team has collected over 2000 pilings from a variety of periods at Yenikapý and in the next three or four years expect to collect 3000 more from the earlier periods. Imported wood from Northern Greece, the Black Sea coast of Turkey, and the Danube - perhaps even up the Danube itself - has already been identified, thereby shedding light on patterns of import and export. Finally Dr. Kuniholm is collaborating with a Bulgarian and EU research effort "Submerged Landscapes, Reconstructing Palaeoenvironment and Settlement Pattern(s) in Prehistory," of which the co-PI (Wazny) is the chairman of the dendrochronological segment. It is expected to retrieve about 1000 dendrochronological samples a year from these sources, some of which are already providing links between the Aegean oak chronology and the absolutely-dated North European oak chronology.
Building a continuous tree-ring time-line from the present to the Neolithic or earlier will allow dating to the year for a variety of cultures in the Near East, Aegean, and Balkans, at present only poorly linked. If the Croatian and Bosnian rivers yield what one might reasonably expect, this will also permit calibration of the European oak radiocarbon timescale before the current 8480 BC. The Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory is a leading US scientific organization and plays a major role in training undergraduate and graduate students in dendrochronology. This grant will also help to maintain the laboratory at it high level of productivity and allow it to continue in its mentoring role.
