TREE-RING ANALYSIS OF PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGICAL TIMBERS FROM SHARDLOW GRAVEL PIT, DERBYSHIRE
Author(s): Ian Tyers
During AD 1998-9 a series of timbers was revealed during gravel extraction operations at the ARC Shardlow site, which is located to the north of the river Trent, at a point where it defines the junction of the counties of Derbyshire and Leicestershire, some 15km south-west of the city of Nottingham. The timbers included naturally deposited oaks, a log-boat, and a number of timbers associated with enigmatic archaeological features. Analysis of the entire assemblage, part-funded by English Heritage and part-funded by the University of Sheffield, has provided absolute dates for some of the naturally deposited timbers in the third millennium BC, but has yielded only a single dated timber from the archaeological deposits. This latter timber appears to be a fragment of a naturally deposited oak of the same period, re-used or otherwise intrusive in an archaeological context and of little interpretive value to the site. The large number of undated sequences from the site have been compared with prehistoric, Roman, and medieval reference chronologies from throughout the UK and northern Europe without successfully obtaining reliable cross-dating.
- Report Number:
- 32/2000
- Series:
- AML Reports (New Series)
- Pages:
- 16
- Keywords:
- Dendrochronology
