Dendrochronology facility

Barbara Appelbaum <aandh [at] pop__mindspring__com> writes

>A client is bringing me a painting on wood with a Jewish subject,
>painted, he says, like an icon.  He thinks it may be related to the
>earliest Jews in Russia, so he would like to have it dated.  He has
>heard of dendrochronology and wants me to arrange for it.  Does
>anyone know of a facility in the U.S. that would able to do this?
>If not, is there somewhere in Russia that could?  There are rather
>old articles in AATA on Russian research on the topic, but not
>recent ones.

There are a number of U.S. labs that do dendrochronology but in
order to actually date a sample the lab needs to have master
chronologies for that particular geographic region (and some are
particular for different tree species).  I don't remember anymore
what labs are working on (e.g. University of Arizona, Penn, etc.)
but I used to work at The Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for
Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology at Cornell University and
they have a nice website that explains a good bit about dendro and
their procedures.  While they've done work in the Balkans I don't
think that their chronologies would extend to Russia, however you
might try contacting them and asking who might be able to examine
your piece.  <URL:http://dendro.cornell.edu>

Before spending time on this though you might want to take a closer
look at the painting and ensure that it has an edge where they can
get a clear look at the rings.  I don't know about more recent
chronologies--but in the material I worked on at Cornell--if there
weren't about 100 rings--it wasn't really worth dating as it would
be too short a sample to fit into a master chronology.

Rachael Perkins Arenstein
917-796-1764


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:63
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