The City of Ithaca was once called the Forest City, and the Cornell campus is undoubtedly one of the most picturesque in the Ivy League. This past summer, over 7,000 trees on campus were inventoried and the oldest tree was identified as a 350-year-old white oak on the southern end of Libe Slope. But in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall, the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology holds samples of trees from around the world that make the towering oaks of Libe Slope seem like mere infants.

Cluttered with microscopes, tree samples and file cabinets, the “Dendro Lab” has had its roots in the Goldwin Smith basement since the 1970s. Dendrochronology is the study and analysis of tree-rings and patterns, which offer important historical climate and environmental information. Over the years, Cornell anthropologists and archaeologists have painstakingly counted millions of tree-rings and mapped out climate signals from thousands of years ago. A major goal of the lab is to map the tree-ring chronology in the Aegean and Near East area for roughly the last 10,000 years, offering a precise historical calendar for a region that played a key role in the development of human civilization. By combining analysis of trees throughout a particular region, researchers are able to match samples of unknown age to their constructed chronology.

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the lab is a long chart of colored strips of paper stretching across the walls. Each strip represents the datable lifetime of a forest or particular archaeological site studied by the lab, with some extending many hundreds of years and dating from before 2,000 B.C. Near the lab’s entrance is a cross-section of a tree labeled as the fourth oldest sequoia on record, with important dates in history from the last few thousand years labeled on the tree-rings.

Many of the samples are collected from trees and ancient monuments by students and faculty on expeditions to Greece and Turkey. After filling luggage and backpacks with as much prehistoric timber as possible, the remaining chunks of wood are shipped back to Ithaca (the one in the western hemisphere). Much of the wood is kept in a dimly-lit storage room directly beneath Kaufman Auditorium, only accessible through a door at the back of the auditorium and down a set of rickety steps. Unfortunate dendrochronologists are often forced to slip into the back of a lecture carrying a pile of logs. Striving to avoid detection, they unlock the door and tip-toe down to the storage area.

Although dendrochronology is grounded in the past, its applications include many disciplines, such as modern climate studies in which chronologies provide foresight into current environmental issues. For students looking for a fascinating branch of research rooted in history, visit the Dendrochronology Lab in Goldwin Smith, where researchers are literally delving into the woods.