4 November, 2025

Launch of New Dendrochronology Service!

IAC is launching a new specialist dendrochronology service. Designed specifically for archaeologists, conservation architects and heritage managers across the island of Ireland, our specialists (Dr Marie-Therese Barrett and Dr Aoife Daly) have led major dendro research projects and have delivered high impact research on non-oak chronology construction and interdisciplinary methods. We have invested in dedicated laboratory space, high-precision measurement instruments (to 0.01mm) and specialist dendro software.

We now offer a complete range of dendrochronology services, from traditional oak chronologies to multi-species tree-ring analysis for non-oak materials, including sampling, data analysis and cross-dating, as well as reporting and archiving. This means we can date construction phases, identify repair/ reuse and provenance supply networks..

Find out more about the service we now offer: here. 

Commenting on the launch our Belfast-based specialist, Dr Marie-Therese Barrett said: “Trees have always fascinated me, both in how they grow and in how they hold the story of the past within them. When I first learnt about dendrochronology, I was in awe of the level of clarity it can bring to the past. With annual precision you can literally see time. As a field archaeologist, I had the privilege of working on a number of wetland sites with a lot of waterlogged wood. In particular, while working at Drumclay, Co. Fermanagh, being surrounded by so much archaeological wood made me wonder: what stories might these non-oak species hold in their rings? That question became an obsession, and that curiosity eventually pulled me back into education — first to do a Masters, and later a PhD at Queens University Belfast, where I trained formally as a dendrochronologist under Dave Brown.
I’ve examined extensive non-oak timbers from the Drumclay site— and out of that work I built the first alder chronology for an Irish site, with fixed calendrical dates. This became the core of my PhD — and it has led to a deeper understanding of the lifespan of Early Medieval rural settlement. We can now see these places weren’t long, static, continuous occupations. They were dynamic sites — built, re-built, repaired, and lived in — on timeframes we can now resolve year by year. And we learned that from non-oak timbers that previously would have been considered too “messy” to tell us anything. Now we can do both: traditional dendrochronology using oak and also tree-ring analysis of the non-oak species that dominate wetland archaeology.”

Dr. Aoife Daly adds: “using dendrochronology to also tell us where the trees grew, adds an additional dimension to how timber remains can shed light on past people. The technique, often termed ‘dendroprovenance’ is hugely useful for analysis of mobile objects like ships or barrels. But we use it also to identify trade of timber as a bulk commodity. Demonstrating the connections between market economies, identifying regions of shortage versus regions with surplus, and all precisely placed in time, allows us to see how this essential resource was exploited throughout the human past.”

Meet us and hear more!
We will be talking about these new research opportunities at Discovery 2025 on Saturday 8th at Queens Univeristy Belfast (booking link here).

If you have a site or structure which involves timber — whether wetland or dryland — contact us now to get early advisory input.

Contact
dendro@iac.ie
+44730 7165606
+44330 221 2139