It has been quiet at this newspaper for a while. One of things I've been working on is the dating of a stump from a (possibly) culturally modified tree (ponderosa pine) from Joes Valley. Twenty-years ago, one of the local archaeologists cut a piece of wood from a dead tree that they identified as a CMT. They placed it in a cardboard box and noted that it could provide evidence of the dates of Native American peeling. I found it last week. So far as I could tell, it had not been touched for two decades, and certainly no one had tried to date it. I sanded it and went to work (above). But, as archaeologists like to complain: It was out of context. What part of the tree was it? To work that out, I joined our current archaeologist in locating the stump last week (below). The red line shows where the wood had been removed. For anyone interested in dating a piece of dead wood, that wasn't the best way to do it. But, just knowing how it was cut has helped me a lot. I now have a tentative pith date of 1585.
