The sources of Baltic oak

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Past trade in oak from the lands to the east and south of the Baltic Sea was extraordinary in that it dominated the Northern European market for specialized oak products for many centuries. Equally extraordinary is the fact that since the 1980s, when a large corpus of dendrochronological data from artworks was demonstrated to represent the material evidence for this past trade, we, until now, have not been able to pinpoint where, in this large region, the trees for this trade grew. Through our analysis we can now present the likely sources of three major timber groups in this material, and significantly, the new chronologies that we make available here, will be the key foundation for dating and identifying provenance of Baltic oak, for tree-ring research long into the future.

Original languageEnglish
Article number105550
JournalJournal of Archaeological Science
Volume139
Number of pages14
ISSN0305-4403
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Ian would like to thank the numerous Galleries, Institutions, auction houses, Trusts, owners, restorers, conservators and art-historians, too numerous to name, for facilitating access to the panels that enabled the building of this dataset. We are hugely grateful for their many fascinating observations and discussions, and their practical assistance over the last 30 years. Thanks are extended to numerous dendrochronology colleagues over the years who have exchanged tree-ring datasets with the authors, enabling the growth of this science and the discoveries of the complexity of past timber exploitation. For this study in particular, special thanks go to Rūtilė Pukienė, Māris Zunde, Alar Läänelaid, Adomas Vitas and Bulat Khasanov for sharing their data with us. Thanks to Henrik Kiær for designing our graphical abstract, to Oisín Daly Frisch Kiær for generating the figure in our supplementary material and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge for permission to reproduce their image (Shipping before Dordrecht. Vlieger, Simon de (Dutch, c.1600-1653). Oil on panel, height 88 cm, width 122.5 cm, 1651. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.). Aoife's project TIMBER has received funding from the European Research Council ( ERC ) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677152 ).

Funding Information:
Ian would like to thank the numerous Galleries, Institutions, auction houses, Trusts, owners, restorers, conservators and art-historians, too numerous to name, for facilitating access to the panels that enabled the building of this dataset. We are hugely grateful for their many fascinating observations and discussions, and their practical assistance over the last 30 years. Thanks are extended to numerous dendrochronology colleagues over the years who have exchanged tree-ring datasets with the authors, enabling the growth of this science and the discoveries of the complexity of past timber exploitation. For this study in particular, special thanks go to R?til? Pukien?, M?ris Zunde, Alar L??nelaid, Adomas Vitas and Bulat Khasanov for sharing their data with us. Thanks to Henrik Ki?r for designing our graphical abstract, to Ois?n Daly Frisch Ki?r for generating the figure in our supplementary material and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge for permission to reproduce their image (Shipping before Dordrecht. Vlieger, Simon de (Dutch, c.1600-1653). Oil on panel, height 88 cm, width 122.5 cm, 1651. ? The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.). Aoife's project TIMBER has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677152).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors

    Research areas

  • 14th to 17th centuries, Baltic oak, Dendroprovenance, Timber trade

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