Dendroarchaeology

Wooden finds are essential in gaining insights into climatic and land use changes but also societal development during the Holocene era.  Dendroarchaeological investigations, using tree rings, wood anatomy and techno-morphological characteristics are of great importance for a better understanding of the past as well as human-environment-interactions.

I have no shortage of oddities around the house.  Birds nests (with eggs), rocks, fossils, antlers, preserved turkey beards, fans and what-not.  One item is a four inch length of branch almost severed in two by a round from a deer rifle.  I kept it as a souvenir of a shot at a dandy buck that was deflected by an offending branch the hunter didn't acquire in his scope.  It doesn't take much to mess-up your well-planned shot; further evidence of the morphology of human interaction with wood.

Some of you readers know that we had our first floor flooring refinished.  This is a consequence of a botched dishwasher installation on behalf of a Green Bay big box retailer.  Details in a future post after the dust (pun intended) has settled.

During one of my daily visits to check on the crew and progress of the work the lead guy, Dan, said to me; Do you know you have a bullet in your floor?

Not that I'm aware-of, I replied.  To the best of my knowledge nobody's ever discharged a firearm in the house.  Dan,no,no; this is a bullet that has been in the wood all along.

Dan continued by explaining that about every five years or so his company discovers a bullet embedded in someone's wood floor.  Just like fragments of barbed wire, nails, bolts, bullets and even cannon balls are found in trees.  The large stuff is typically uncovered when it damages saw blades at the mill.  But the small stuff, most of the time, escapes notice.  In our case Dan knew enough to not remove the bullet  from the white oak plank.  He left it there knowing we would appreciate the dendroarchaeological value of having this left as a conversation piece.  He even shined it up a bit so that it glints when the sunlight filters through the windows precisely the right way.

The back story is that the bullet is likely the result of a hunter's stray shot.  Regrettably, there is insufficient tree ring data to trace how old it is.  Nevertheless, if you examine it closely you can see that as the tree continued to grow it also grew a callus around the projectile as a response to the wound.  

The tree is now dead, but the wood and bullet persist in our lives.  I'm glad Dan found it as I've been walking past it for a couple of decades completely clueless.  If only that tree could talk.  Maybe it wasn't a hunter's stray bullet.  Might it have been from a homicide?  A gunfight involving Chicago gangsters?  A conflict with the natives during European settlement?  Or some other violent event?  Who knows?

The next time you visit remind me to point it out.  And you can advance your own theories about how it came about.