Charlotte L. PearsonThe University of Arizona | UA · Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research
Charlotte L. Pearson
PhD Archaeological Science
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61
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2013 - September 2016
June 2007 - December 2012
January 2005 - June 2007
Publications
Publications (61)
The IntCal family of radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) calibration curves is based on research spanning more than three decades. The IntCal group have collated the ¹⁴ C and calendar age data (mostly derived from primary publications with other types of data and meta-data) and, since 2010, made them available for other sorts of analysis through an open-access dat...
Introduction
During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been suggestions that various techniques could be employed to improve the fit and, therefore, the effectiveness of face masks. It is well recognized that improving fit tends to improve mask effectiveness, but whether these fit modifiers are reliable remains unexplored. In this stud...
Radiocarbon dating uses the decay of a radioactive isotope of carbon (14C) to measure time and date objects containing carbon-bearing material. With a half-life of 5,700 ± 30 years, detection of 14C is a useful tool for determining the age of a specimen formed over the past 55,000 years. In this Primer, we outline key advances in 14C measurement an...
The Sun sporadically produces eruptive events leading to intense fluxes of solar energetic particles (SEPs) that dramatically disrupt the near-Earth radiation environment. Such events are directly studied for the last decades but little is known about the occurrence and magnitude of rare, extreme SEP events. Presently, a few events that produced me...
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in the design and production of fabric face coverings. There are few published methods which enable mask designers, makers and purchasers to assess the relative filtration ability of mask making materials. Those methods which do exist are prohibitively expensive and difficult to conduct. As a result, mask ma...
The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn unprecedented attention to the use of masks and fabric face coverings to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2. The fit of a mask has been identified as one the primary factors in determining the effectiveness of masks. If substantial gaps exist between the mask and the wearers face, air may t...
Introduction:
Qualitative fit testing is a popular method of ensuring the fit of sealing face masks such as N95 and FFP3 masks. Increased demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to shortages in testing equipment and has forced many institutions to abandon fit testing. Three key materials are required for qualitative fit testing: the test solut...
Early researchers of radiocarbon levels in Southern Hemisphere tree rings identified a variable North-South hemispheric offset, necessitating construction of a separate radiocarbon calibration curve for the South. We present here SHCal20, a revised calibration curve from 0-55,000 cal BP, based upon SHCal13 and fortified by the addition of 14 new tr...
Introduction:
Qualitative fit testing is a popular method of ensuring the fit of sealing face masks such as N95 and FFP3 masks. Increased demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to shortages in testing equipment and has forced many institutions to abandon fit testing. Three key materials are required for qualitative fit testing: the test soluti...
Annually resolved tree-ring samples of the time period 1625–1510 BCE were analyzed from the German oak tree-ring chronology. Blocks of the same tree rings were previously used to generate IntCal calibration data. The new dataset shows an offset to the calibration data IntCal13 of 24 years and resembles annual data for the same time period derived f...
In 2018 Pearson et al. published a new sequence of annual radiocarbon (14 C) data derived from oak (Quercus sp.) trees from Northern Ireland and bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) from North America across the period 1700-1500 BC. The study indicated that the more highly resolved shape of an annually based calibration dataset could improve the accur...
Significance
This study demonstrates how different lines of evidence from tree rings in widely spread growth locations can combine to fix an approximately dated tree-ring record from the East Mediterranean Bronze–Iron Age to an exact calendar-dated range. This tree-ring record is of high importance for regional chronology and spans the time period...
From its inception as a scientific discipline, tree-ring research has been used as a trans-disciplinary tool for dating and environmental reconstruction. Tree-ring chronologies in some regions extend back many thousands of years, opening up new potential for the study of climate, people, and ecology at annual and sub-annual resolution. As such, the...
Radiocarbon (C) ages cannot provide absolutely dated chronologies for archaeological or paleoenvironmental studies directly but must be converted to calendar age equivalents using a calibration curve compensating for fluctuations in atmospheric C concentration. Although calibration curves are constructed from independently dated archives, they inva...
Tree-rings provide precise annually dated climate information, but their application can be limited by the relatively short lifespan of many trees. To overcome this limitation, tree-ring records can be extended over longer time periods by connecting living trees with older “sub-fossil” trees, which can provide information on longer timescales throu...
Much discussion has revolved around proper sample types and pretreatment methods to generate a calibration dataset that would allow for the most accurate representation of an unknown sample's calendar age. Since the development of radiocarbon dating, tree-rings have played a vital role in the creation of global calibration datasets, with these samp...
Front Cover Legend: The cover image is based on the Research Article Establishing a high‐resolution stratigraphy in the Holocene marine sequence of the ancient Theodosian harbor of Istanbul with the help of dendrochronology, by M. Namik Yalçin et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.21729.
Salvage excavations in the Theodosian harbor (Yenikapı‐Istanbul) have uncovered diverse archaeological objects including 36 shipwrecks and various Byzantine period wooden docks. The sequence of these docks provided a unique opportunity to obtain a high‐resolution stratigraphy. The new approach is based on stratigraphic interpretation of deformation...
Scots pine is an adaptable and prevalent European tree species that grows naturally throughout Europe and has been planted in a wide range of environments. Previous studies have indicated that climatic variables affect tree-ring growth patterns in this species, but it is also possible that certain aspects of the growth environment moderate this res...
Two floating, ring-width chronologies predate the long bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) absolutely-dated, ring-width chronology from the Methuselah Walk (MWK) site in the White Mountains of California. The two non-overlapping floating chronologies were derived from samples that crossdate internally but are temporally unconnected to each other and...
This study aims to reveal sedimentary traces of paleoenvironmental changes which occurred due to fluctuating climatic conditions and anthropogenic activities in the Amuq Valley of Hatay. As part of the regional geoarchaeological survey, piston coring equipment generally used for lacustrine and marine sediments was modified and reinforced to retriev...
Frost rings can provide direct evidence of anomalously cold summertime conditions on hemispheric scales. Here we report frost rings in subfossil pinewood from Finnish Lapland dated dendrochronologically to AD 536 and 1627 BC. These exact calendar dates have been vividly discussed in the literature in the respective contexts of a cold climate anomal...
The mid-second millennium BCE eruption of Thera (Santorini) offers a critically important marker horizon to synchronize archaeological chronologies of the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East and to anchor paleoenvironmental records from ice cores, speleothems, and lake sediments. Precise and accurate dating for the event has been the subject of many d...
We performed a new series of measurements on samples that were part of early measurements on radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dating made in 1948–1949. Our results show generally good agreement to the data published in 1949–1951, despite vast changes in technology, with only two exceptions where there was a discrepancy in the original studies. Our new measureme...
The unique position of dendrochronology at the nexus of archeology, ecology, and climatology allows it to play a pivotal role in the study of past human-environment interactions. Yet, few tree-ring studies in Europe and eastern North America have been used to study pre-industrial land-use changes, forest ecology, and carbon dynamics and thus to con...
The origins of Venice have been of great interest to Venetians and to scholars more generally for centuries. Long shrouded in myth and legend due to the dearth of pre-ninth-century AD evidence, recent archaeological research is now illuminating how the famous city built on water began. Using high-resolution AMS dating of peach stones (pits) from be...
Despite several decades of research focusing on prehispanic human ecology, debate continues over the impact of climatic and anthropogenic landscape change on human populations in Mesoamerica. One problem in identifying the cause of this change is the lack of high-resolution paleo-environmental data from many regions. The southern Mexican highlands,...
Volcanic eruptions have a diverse range of potential impacts for human societies. From localized destruction, to agricultural enhancement, to sudden, short term climatic perturbations and their associated consequences. Establishing a precise and accurate chronological anchor for the onset and duration of events is central to any investigation of th...
A total of 272 oak (Quercus sp.) samples have been collected from large subfossil trees dredged from sediment deposited by the Sava and various tributary rivers in the Zagreb region of northwestern Croatia, and in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Measurement series of tree-ring widths from these samples produced 12 groups, totaling 3456 years of fl...
Precipitation around Cyprus, a relatively small island, is generally consistent in year-to-year variation in all dimensions except amplitude, with the higher elevations in the west generally receiving more precipitation. An annual record of precipitation was found in tree-rings of the predominant pine species, Pinus brutia Ten., which grows from th...
The date of the volcanic eruption of Santorini that caused extensive damage to Minoan Crete has been controversial since the 1980s. Some have placed the event in the late seventeenth century BC. Others have made the case for a younger date of around 1500 BC. A recent contribution to that controversy has been the dating of an olive tree branch prese...
The date of the volcanic eruption of Santorini that caused extensive damage toMinoan Crete has been controversial since the 1980s. Some have placed the event in the late seventeenth century BC. Others have made the case for a younger date of around 1500 BC. A recent contribution to that controversy has been the dating of an olive tree branch preser...
Preface: Center for Mediterranean Archaeology and the Environment-Special Joint Issue of Radiocarbon and Tree-Ring Research - Volume 56 Issue 4 - Charlotte L. Pearson, Steven L. Kuhn
A total of 272 oak ( Quercus sp.) samples have been collected from large subfossil trees dredged from sediment deposited by the Sava and various tributary rivers in the Zagreb region of northwestern Croatia, and in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Measurement series of tree-ring widths from these samples produced 12 groups, totaling 3456 years of f...
Olive trees are a classic component of Mediterranean environments and some of them are known historically to be very old. In order to evaluate the possibility to use olive tree-rings for dendrochronology, we examined by various methods the reliability of olive tree-rings identification. Dendrochronological analyses of olive trees growing on the Aeg...
Fire scars in dated sequences of tree-rings are regularly used for the reconstruction of histories of forest fire frequency and investigations of various exogenous factors (climate in particular) which may control such events. The potential of the tree-ring archive in this regard is such that in circumstances where no scarring occurs following a pa...
Dendrochronological and oxygen–carbon isotopic analysis was conducted on tree rings collected at two different elevations from three different regions in western Anatolia, Turkey. Tree rings were sampled from Anatolian black pines (Pinus nigra Arn. subsp. pallasiana (Lamb.) Holmboe) of at least 200 years old through an N–S transect covering Bolu-Me...
The East Mediterranean Radiocarbon (inter-)Comparison Project (EMRCP) has measured the 14C ages of a number of sets of tree rings from the Gordion Area dendrochronology from central Anatolia at the Heidelberg Radiocarbon Laboratory. In several cases, multiple measurements were made over a period from the 1980s to 2009. This paper presents the final...
Dendrochemical analyses of absolutely dated, overlapping sequences of tree rings allow identification of temporally conscribed, volcanically influenced periods of environmental change. Dendrochemistry, or the study of tree-ring elemental composition, is a promising new technique for reconstructing climate/environmental history at annual resolution....
The most marked tree-ring growth anomaly in the Aegean dendrochronological record over the last 9000 years occurs in the mid 17th century BC, and has been speculatively correlated with the impact of the Late Bronze Age eruption of Thera (Santorini). If such a connection could be proved it would be of major interdisciplinary significance. It would o...
Synchrotron Radiation Scanning X-Ray Fluorescence Microscopy (SXFM) was
used for the first spatially/temporally resolved investigation of the
multielemental chemistry of bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva D.K.
Bailey). A new protocol was designed to apply this nondestructive method
of analysis to this unique palaeoclimatological resource, extracting...
In this chapter, the authors take a high resolution multi-evidentiary approach to examine a single stratified feature from
a seventeenth-century house lot in meticulous detail. In doing so, the possibility of interpreting detailed issues of site,
structure and landscape are demonstrated; far beyond the capabilities of a standard, rote artifact anal...
Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was used to investigate changes in trace element concentration in two high resolution sequences of tree rings from central Sweden. Individual annual growth increments from 1800–2002 to 1930–2002 were sampled from two Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) trees from the Siljansfors Experimental Forest. T...
In this chapter, the authors take a high resolution multi-evidentiary approach to examine a single stratified feature from a seventeenth-century house lot in meticulous detail. In doing so, the possibility of interpreting detailed issues of site, structure and landscape are demonstrated; far beyond the capabilities of a standard, rote artifact anal...
Discussion of the significance of volcanically induced impacts on human history, the natural environment, and climate through the Holocene, has frequently stalled because of controversy concerning certain key volcanic eruptions and their precise relationships with the archaeological/environmental record. A major stumbling block in such debates is a...
The authors report on radiocarbon data derived from carefully selected organic material from Late Minoan IA and IB contexts. The results suggest that the accepted chronology of the period should be revised by 100 years and that the eruption of Thera/Santorini most likely occurred c. 1650-1620 BC. It has been stated that 14C dating could not contrib...
Investigations of volcanic impact on human society and the environment are presently restrained by a lack of secure absolute dates for eruptions prior to the last few hundred years. The degree of impact and recovery, and the scope of any sociological repercussions, can only be fully explored if working from a precise, known, starting point and agai...