16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

38 16 th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology Aoife Daly, Alicia Van Ham-Meert & Paloma Fernandez Diaz-Maroto Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark New analytical methods for ship timber provenance analysis – win some, lose some During the last few years, the TIMBER research team have been exploring new methods to refine the identification of the origin of the timber in shipwrecks. While tree-ring analysis has proven a highly reliable tool through the use of ‘den- droprovenance’, we wished to address gaps that appear in that technique. Could other techniques refine, for example, the precision of the dendroprovenance re- sult, or point to timber sources for which we do not (yet) have dendrochronolog- ical datasets? We explored two approaches, Strontium isotopic analysis and ancient DNA. Strontium is taken up in plants from the soil, and the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratio is derived ulti- mately from the bedrock. Identifying this ratio in the timber should allow identi- fication of the geology on which the tree grew. However, ship timbers preserved underwater absorb the water’s Sr, or they might even exchange Sr with the water in which they are immersed, and the main challenge for this study was to examine if this ‘contaminant’ could be removed, so that the tree’s original Sr chemistry could be measured. DNA is in all living organisms, and mapping of the genome of living oaks in Europe has shown a clear geographical distribution of haplotypes, east to west, across the continent. We know that DNA is a good tool for examining provenance, but it depends heavily on the preservation of the aDNA. In this talk we will pres- ent the results of these experiments and suggest how we might apply these new methods in future enquiry into past procurement of timber for shipbuilding. These questions have been examined in the project TIMBER (Northern Eu- rope’s timber resource - chronology, origin and exploitation) which received fund- ing from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Ho- rizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677152).