The Byzantine World

The Byzantine dendro-world has not been as rich as Europe north of the Alps (few bogs, and the rivers have been picked clean). Secure oak and conifer chronologies built by the Cornell laboratory from some 200 buildings (as of March 2007) are as follows:

Oak Turkey

Black Sea Coast Central and Western Greece Thrace and Thessalonike ‘Yugoslavia’ Late ‘Yugoslavia’ Early

Less-secure, and still tentative chronologies from some 46 sites are:

‘Roman Gap’ Oak, Late  381-2004

‘Roman Gap’ Oak, Early —518-348 estimated

The ‘Roman Gap’ terminology deserves explanation. The late first millennium bce and the early first millennium ce have given us more trouble than all the other nine millennia combined from which we have collected wood. Although we have over 100 oak chronologies or singleton pieces in hand, many of the data sets are short, many only 100-150 years long, and the collection sites range from Italy and Croatia to eastern Turkey. Seaside sites could have been supplied by ship from anywhere in the Roman world. As more material is collected and added to the above, the so-called ‘Roman Gap’ problem should sort itself out. For example, several really long data sets would confirm the overlapping placements of the shorter ones. In the summer of 2006 some 600 oak samples were collected from the Yenikapi excavations in Istanbul and are being measured. It is entirely possible that this approximately 33-year gap between 348 and 381 will have been filled by the time anybody reads this prose. At Http://arts. cornell. edu/dendro We wiU post a list by May 2007 for any reader who needs a Byzantine or meta-Byzantine date. To save the reader additional time and effort, we will also post a list of the 400-odd buildings which we have already visited and which have not yielded any datable wood.