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.
The goal of the past three years work was to try to extend the Aegean oak tree-ring chronology to bridge across the "Roman Gap" -- i.e., the centuries before and after the BC/AD transition, where samples until now had been sparse or widely-scattered, also to try to extend the oak chronology through the BC period as far as possible.  "A 2367-Year Oak Tree-Ring Chronology from 98 Sites for the Aegean, East Mediterranean, and Black Seas: the Marmaray Contribution" submitted by us in 2011 has not yet appeared (to be published by Peeters Press in Belgium). See Figure 1. This year's work has fleshed out many of the thinner spots in the chain of evidence so that the chronology from today through to the Hellenistic looks good.  The Marmaray Project (a metro system under Istanbul and under the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia--see the excavation for the central station in Figure 2) so far has yielded 1441 years of chronologies from almost 4000 samples in three big chronological blocks which permitted the dating of material collected and measured--but not dated--as far back as 1974. The 2013 collection, especially the deep sounding at Sirkeci station, ought to add a significant extension on the early end. See Figure 3.  The Marmaray excavations will continue in some sectors for at least another year or two, possibly three. We do not yet know what is under the surface there.  We are now able to source much tree-ring data to specific regions ('dendroprovenancing') such as the Northern Adriatic, Romania and the Danube, even Hungary. Some earlier master tree-ring chronologies developed by us between 1977 and 2008 with NSF support need to be dissected and reconstructed according to the new geographical information that was lacking before the Marmaray Project produced such a flood of new material. The import and export of timber was much more common than we had realized, although we had had unverifiable hints of it. The slowdown in the European economy has meant decreased demand for furniture and therefore less dredging on the Balkan rivers for subfossil oak for us, but Dr. Wazny was able to retrieve a quarter of a ton there this year, too. See Figure 4.  Dr. Pearson has so far put together eight chronologies and some long singleton samples that span about 12 of the centuries between 800 BP and 8100 BP. A bar-graph of the preliminary determinations is attached. See Figure 5.  Work on the subfossil oaks in the Bosnian and Croatian rivers continues, and this looks to be a likely source for the future, as is the exploitation of prehistoric timbers in the Macedonian lakes (some 6000 pilings in Lake Ohrid alone). We realize that it took 4000 samples from the Rhine, 4000 from the Danube, and 10,000 from the Main to build the long German chronologies.  After years of effort we are at last finding links between the tree-ring chronologies of northern Europe and those of the Balkans and the Aegean. Crossdating is now possible via Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. See Figure 6.  Dr. Brewer's work on data standards and the Tellervo software has facilitated processing the large quantity of samples from the Marmaray project. Once analysis of the material from 2013/14 has been completed, the new chronologies will be made accessible to the wider research community through the DCCD repository.
