Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Domínguez-Delmás, Marta
• Rich, Sara
• Traoré, Mohamed
• Hajj, Fadi
• Poszwa, Anne
• Akhmetzyanov, Linar
• García-González, Ignacio
• Groenendijk, Peter

Titel

Tree-ring chronologies, stable strontium isotopes and biochemicalcompounds: Towards reference datasets to provenance Iberianshipwreck timbers

Ist Teil von

• Journal of archaeological science, reports, 2020, Vol.34 (102640)

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Studies on the provenance of wood for shipbuilding contribute widely to the fields of archaeology, anthropology,environmental history, cultural geography, and palaeoclimatology. The development of reference datasets todetermine the date and provenance of shipwreck timbers is therefore a paramount undertaking. Here we compileand present recent advances in the development of tree-ring chronologies, stable strontium isotope ratios andchemical biomarkers aimed to determine the date and provenance of Iberian shipwreck timbers. A set of oak andpine tree-ring chronologies have been developed from living trees covering the past 500 and 800 years,respectively, and have served to confirm the provenance of the wood used in an 18th-century Spanish ship of theRoyal Navy. Stable strontium isotopic signatures have been obtained from soil and living trees at 26 sitesthroughout the Iberian Peninsula, providing a climate-independent geochemical network to source the origin ofhistoric timbers. However, retrieving the original isotopic signature from waterlogged samples remains unsuccessful,stressing the need to develop effective protocols to separate the seawater signal from the originalstrontium isotope ratios in the wood. Analyses of organic compounds in wood of living trees have proven suitableto discriminate species and provenances, but results on shipwreck timbers are inconclusive and should be furtherexplored. Our regional approach has the potential to be expanded to other areas and archaeological timbers fromdifferent periods throughout the Anthropocene. We highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the techniquespresented when applied to waterlogged wood, propose GIS tools to interpret and visualize combined results, andstress the need to expand these type of reference datasets to allow for multiproxy dendroprovenancingapproaches.