Dendroarchaeology between teleconnection and regional patterns

Martinelli, Nicoletta (author), Čufar, Katarina (author), Billamboz, André (author)

In the last decades, dendrochronology has led to major advances in the study of pile-dwelling settlements in the Circum-Alpine area, both by providing accurate single-year precision dates and contributing to the reconstruction of settlements, building activities, and palaeo-envi- ronment. The paper focuses on two main, still current goals in tree-ring re- search: absolute dating on a calendrical time scale of prehistoric set- tlements south of the Alps, and detection of ecological regional patterns from the dendro-series.South of the Alps, in northern Italy and Slovenia, numerous tree-ring chronologies have been constructed for pile-dwelling settlements. They have been dated precisely, to within ±10 years in some cases, using wiggle-matching technique based on a combination of radio- carbon dating and dendrochronology. Dendrochronological dating has not been possible since there are no multimillenial oak reference chronologies for the regions south of the Alps, while teleconnection with the existing chronologies north of the Alps (mainly Germany) has not been successful. However, investigations of modern oak wood have shown that teleconnection over the Alps can work if the chronolo- gies are long (multicentennial) and well-replicated. It has been also shown that it is possible to cross-date remote prehistoric chronologies, like the ones from Palù di Livenza (Pordenone, Italy) and Hocevarica (Ljubljana, Slovenia) from the first half of the 4th millennium BC. unfortunately, most pile dwellings in Italy and Slovenia did not exist in the same period and it appears that there is not enough suitable wood to construct a regional chronology covering the period from the pres- ent time to the 4th millennium BC. A future construction of longer chronologies with adequate replication to cross-date them with those from the north of the Alps is more likely. There, tree-ring network de- velopment and advances in dendroecology are paving the way for a new ecological approach, taking into account the entire information potential of tree-ring series. Dendrotypology applied to large sample sets is seen as a key approach to socio-economical and environmental aspects of pile-dwelling research: building activities and timber sup- ply, duration and relocation of lake-shore settlements, woodland prac- tices and the potential of land use. ecological aspects of woodland development, shown for instance by signals of cockchafer in oak tree- ring series, are described in relation to climate evolution and human activities. We demonstrate how dendroarchaeological potential can help to better understand the development of prehistoric settlements in wetlands around the Alps, as well as the environmental variability in time and space, in the regional context of areas once largely domi- nated by the forests.

• Language: English
• Typology: 1.08 - Published Scientific Conference Contribution
• Organization: BF - Biotechnical Faculty
• Year: 2011
• Number of pages: Str. 67-77
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-127093
• UDC: 630*561.24
• COBISS.SI-ID: 63484675
• Publication date in RUL: 17.05.2021

Record is a part of a monograph

• Title: Le palafitte : ricerca, conservazione, valorizzazione dei siti palafitticoli
• Editors: Marco Baioni
• Place of publishing: Quingentole
• Publisher: Società Archeologica
• ISBN: 978-88-99547-30-1
• COBISS.SI-ID: 45531181
• Collection title: Palafitte
• Collection numbering: 0

Secondary language

• Language: Italian
• Keywords: dendroarheologija, dendrokronologija, telekonekcija

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: P4-0015
• Name: Les in lignocelulozni kompoziti

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: L6-4157
• Name: Prazgodovinska kolišča na Ljubljanskem barju, Slovenija: kronologija, kultura in paleookolje