Using dendrochronology to date a house

[sevfiv]

Interesting way for researchers to help determine dates associated with homes and their parts..

Researchers create a master chronology by visiting a living forest and collecting many growth-ring samples from living and long-dead trees. In this case, researchers had created a massive chronology based on longleaf pine stumps in the Lake Louise, Ga., area.

The pines were full of resin, which kept the stumps extremely well-preserved, and some samples from that area dated to the 1400s, says Grissino-Mayer.

Once researchers have a baseline chronology of growth rings, they can extract samples from the building or wooden artifact whose date is in question and cross-check using a computer program that compares the relationship between tree rings to find matches.

http://futurity.org/science-technology/tree-ring-dating-rewrites-homes-history/