Stumped

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.