A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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dendrochronology
Dendrochronology is dating by tree rings. A tree in a seasonal climate lays down one ring a year and the width of that ring records the growing conditions, so a stand of trees in one region shares a pattern of fat and thin years like a barcode. Matching that pattern from living trees back through old beams, timbers, and buried logs builds a continuous chronology, and any piece of wood that fits it can be dated to the year it was cut.
Etymology
The word is Greek for the study of tree time, from the words for tree and for time. It was coined by the man who invented the method, Andrew Ellicott Douglass, who was not a botanist at all but an astronomer. He was working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff and wanted to know whether sunspot cycles showed up in the earth’s weather, so he went looking for a climate record older than any thermometer, and trees were what he found.
Notes
Douglass eventually turned the method on Southwestern archaeology. He had one chronology running back from living trees and another floating loose among the ruins with no dates attached, and for years he could not connect them. In 1929 a charred beam collected at Show Low, Arizona, and catalogued as HH-39 closed the gap, which put a calendar year on hundreds of Puebloan sites at once. He founded the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in 1937.