Karl-Uwe Heussner

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut · Referat Naturwissenschaften/Dendrochronologie

Although variations in building activity are a useful indicator of societal well-being and demographic development, historical datasets for larger regions and longer periods are still rare. Here, we present 54,045 annually precise dendrochronological felling dates from historical construction timber from across most of Europe between 1250 and 1699...

Moscow 0 km 2000 N Study area The carved wooden object uncovered from the Shigir peat bog in the Sverdlovsk region towards the end of the nineteenth century remains one of the oldest, known examples of monumental anthropomorphic sculpture from anywhere in the world. Recent application of new analytical techniques has led to the discovery of new ima...

The African baobab, Adansonia digitata, has great paleoclimatological potential because of its wide distributional range and millennial lifespan. However, dendroclimatological approaches are hampered by dating uncertainties due to its parenchyma-dominated wood anatomy. Here, securely-dated time series of annual wood increment growth and intra-ring...

Two tree-ring series, one from a high-latitude pine tree (located in northern Scandinavia) and one from a mid-latitude oak tree (located in eastern Germany) were analyzed for radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) at annual resolution. The new records cover the calendar date ranges 290–460 AD and 382–486 AD, respectively, overlapping by 79 yr. The series show similar...

In many parts of the world, especially in the temperate regions of Europe and North-America, accelerated tree growth rates have been observed over the last decades. This widespread phenomenon is presumably caused by a combination of factors like atmospheric fertilization or changes in forest structure and/or management. If not properly acknowledged...

The original version of this Article contained an error in the Data Availability section, which incorrectly read ‘All data will be freely available via https://www.ams.ethz.ch/research.html.’ The correct version states ‘http://www.ams.ethz.ch/research/published-data.html’ in place of ‘https://www.ams.ethz.ch/research.html’. This has been corrected...

The Northeast German Lowland Observatory (TERENO-NE) was established to investigate the regional impact of climate and land use change. TERENO-NE focuses on the Northeast German lowlands, for which a high vulnerability has been determined due to increasing temperatures and decreasing amounts of precipitation projected for the coming decades. To fac...

The Northeast German Lowland Observatory (TERENO-NE) was established to investigate the regional impact of global change. TERENO-NE focuses on the Northeast German lowlands, for which a high vulnerability has been determined due to increasing temperatures and decreasing amounts of precipitation projected for the coming decades. In order to facilita...

Though tree-ring chronologies are annually resolved, their dating has never been independently validated at the global scale. Moreover, it is unknown if atmospheric radiocarbon enrichment events of cosmogenic origin leave spatiotemporally consistent fingerprints. Here we measure the 14C content in 484 individual tree rings formed in the periods 770...

The carved wooden object uncovered from the Shigir peat bog in the Sverdlovsk region towards the end of the nineteenth century remains one of the oldest, known examples of monumental anthropomorphic sculpture from anywhere in the world. Recent application of new analytical techniques has led to the discovery of new imagery on its surface, and has p...

We present a new tree-ring-width chronology of Schrenk spruce (Picea schrenkiana Fisch. et Mey.) based on samples collected in the Terskey Alatau, southeastern Kazakhstan. Climate-growth response showed that precipitation in the preceding August is one of the strongest limiting factor of radial growth. We also obtained a 183-year precipitation reco...

An interdisciplinary study was carried out to trace the hydrological changes of the Havel River in northeastern central Europe over the last ca. 2000 years. This research was driven by the hypothesis that the present-day riverscape is to a large degree a result of medieval and modern human transformation of the drainage system. The river system for...

Reconstructing the colonization and demographic dynamics that gave rise to extant forests is essential to forecasts of forest responses to environmental changes. Classical approaches to map how population of trees changed through space and time largely rely on pollen distribution patterns, with only a limited number of studies exploiting DNA molecu...

The Great Shigir Idol discovered in 1890 in the course of a gold mining operation at the Shigir peat bog is the oldest known monumental wooden sculpture. In 2014 a team of archaeologists and scientists from Russia and Germany have undertaken a comprehensive study of idol. The original sculpture was 5.3 m high, the height of the surviving part was 3...

The wide availability of accelerator mass spectrometry – AMS – as a standard tool for 14C analysis is opening the way to generate larger numbers of high resolution 14C tree-ring data. Only small amounts of sample material is needed for AMS compared to the decay-counting technique that has predominantly been used for measuring tree-ring datasets in...

Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) is a widely used tree species in European dendroclimatology studies due to its common distribution across much of the continent. Almost all studies find radial growth strongly related to summer temperature, a result reflecting site selection at high elevation/latitude environments where trees grow at their ecophysio...

Historical charcoal production has long been an unconsidered type of forest utilization in lowland areas. The archaeological discovery of a large charcoal burning area in the forefield of the active opencast lignite mine Jänschwalde in SE Brandenburg (North German Lowlands) has highlighted the need for multidisciplinary research in the study of the...

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), all of Africa is very likely to warm up more than the global average during this century. Especially (semi-)arid regions are expected to experience particularly high warming and possibly catastrophic droughts. However, assessments of the impacts of climate change on these regions ar...

Archaeological excavations have revealed more than thousand charcoal kiln remains (CKRs) in the prefield of the active opencast lignite mine Jänschwalde, situated about 150 km SE of Berlin (SE Brandenburg, Germany). The charcoal was mainly produced for the ironwork Peitz nearby, which operated from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries. In a first app...

European lowlands experience many direct and indirect influences of global warming, particularly related to the hydrological cycle which lately faces increasing flood and drought events. Although important for humans and the ecosystems in which they live, little is known about the long-term spatiotemporal hydrological changes in various European re...

An interdisciplinary study was carried out in order to trace the human transformation of the medium-scale Havel River in northeastern central Europe during the last c. 2000 years. This research was driven by the hypothesis that the present-day riverscape is widely a legacy of medieval and modern human transformation of the drainage system initiated...

Tree-ring based temperature reconstructions form a substantial part of the international proxy data base used to examine and model global climate variations of the last Millennium. However, most tree-ring based reconstructions are derived from study sites in the high latitudes or high altitudes, paying very little attention to low elevation sites....

Climate model projections suggest widespread drying in the Mediterranean Basin and wetting in Fennoscandia in the coming decades largely as a consequence of greenhouse gas forcing of climate. To place these and other “Old World” climate projections into historical perspective based on more complete estimates of natural hydroclimatic variability, we...

In the glacially formed landscape of north-eastern Germany pronounced hydrological changes have been detected in recent decades, leading to the general question how lake levels and related groundwater levels perform in a long-term perspective, i.e. during the last c. 100 years. But long-term lake-level records are rare; most observations do not sta...

The excavation of the collapsed wooden roof and ceiling from the House of the Telephus Relief's Marble Room took place as part of the Herculaneum Conservation Project. This exceptional discovery allowed researchers to identify a variety of tool marks on the wood and to reconstruct ancient carpentry techniques. Dendrochronological analyses made it p...

Amsterdam experienced the greatest upturn in its economic fortunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This went hand in hand with brisk building activity throughout the city. As part of studies into construction history, 679 samples of wood were subjected to dendrochronological examination. Since Amsterdam very swiftly exhausted local wood...

In pre-industrial times, charcoal burning was a common source of energy across Europe. Charcoal production and its related consequences for the upland environment are well known due to historical and palaeoenvironmental research. In recent years, awareness has grown regarding the use of woods in the lowlands for charcoal production. In the last 20...

Forest decline played a pivotal role in motivating Europe's political focus on sustainability around 35 years ago. Silver fir (Abies alba) exhibited a particularly severe dieback in the mid-1970s, but disentangling biotic from abiotic drivers remained challenging because both spatial and temporal data were lacking. Here, we analyze 14 136 samples f...

Amsterdam experienced the greatest upturn in its economic fortunes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This went hand in hand with brisk building activity throughout the city. As part of studies into construction history, 679 samples of wood were subjected to dendrochronological examination. Since Amsterdam very swiftly exhausted local wood...

The Kalahari features a long-lived lacustrine system which may exist since the Early Pleistocene. The emergence of an extant cichlid fish radiation from this (palaeo-) lake during the Middle Pleistocene indicates an ancient lake character. The early history of the system remains speculative, but it is established that lake extensions matching moder...

Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions form the scientific backbone of the current global change debate. Although some European records extend into medieval times, high-resolution, long-term, regional-scale paleoclimatic evidence is missing for the eastern part of the continent. Here we compile 545 samples of living trees and historical timber...

Publication and discussion of the dendrochronological and radiocarbon dating results for the Hellenistic fortress of Kurganzol.

Annual precipitation for the last 2,500 years was reconstructed for northeastern Qinghai from living and archaeological juniper trees. A dominant feature of the precipitation of this area is a high degree of variability in mean rainfall at annual, decadal, and centennial scales, with many wet and dry periods that are corroborated by other paleoclim...

Uncertainty related to the rate and magnitude of predicted anthropogenic climate change highlights the need to enhance our understanding of past natural fluctuations in the Earth's climate system. This task emphasizes the importance of high-resolution palaeoclimatic records that cover industrial and pre-industrial times. Annually resolved and absol...

Palaeoclimate proxies have shown links between climate changes and volcanic activity. However, not much is known about the impact of volcanic outbursts on growth of lowland trees. We investigate the effect of large volcanic eruptions on the growth rate of trees. The study is based on an unexplored comprehensive database with 1128 samples of long tr...

Climate variations influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution paleoclimatic evidence. We present tree ring-based reconstructions of cent...

This report concerns research on the architectural history of Salar households conducted between 2004 and 2006. The Salars are an Oghuz-Turkic people who in the 13th century migrated with Gengis Khan's troops from the Samarkand area to northern Tibet. The present project compared house construction styles and the use of living space in two Salar co...

The present study is a summarizing report of the interdisciplinary research on rural Salar homesteads and traditional life style conducted in north-western China from 2004 to 2006. According to oral tradition, the Salar left their homeland around Samarqand (in modern Uzbekistan) in the entourage of Genghis Khan in the 13th century and settled the f...

Annual precipitation for the last 2,500years was reconstructed for northeastern Qinghai from living and archaeological juniper trees. A dominant feature of the precipitation of this area is a high degree of variability in mean rainfall at annual, decadal, and centennial scales, with many wet and dry periods that are corroborated by other paleoclima...

Recent archaeological research results show that an intensive cultural as well as economic exchange took place between Western and South-Eastern China since the early Bronze Age. It can be assumed that the exchange was based on comparatively well developed land-use activities. Geo-archaeological investigations concerning the environmental impact of...

Zusammenfassung Neuere archäologische Forschungsergebnisse belegen, dass seit der frühen Bronzezeit ein intensiver kultureller und wirtschaftlicher Austausch zwischen West- und Südostchina bestand. Es war anzunehmen, dass die Grundlage dieses Austausches vergleichsweise weit entwickelte Landnutzungsaktivitäten waren. Geoarchäologische Untersuchunge...

Le puits de Schmerzke, date par la dendrochronologie de 736 ap. J.-C., ainsi que les sites slaves precoces du Nord-Est de l'Allemagne dates de maniere absolue servent de point de depart a une etude de la chronologie de la colonisation slave precoce et de l'evolution de la ceramique. La question posee est de savoir si les reperes chronologiques de l...

The chronology of early Slav occupation and the development of pottery are examined based on the Schmerzke water well, which is dendrochronologically dated to 736, and on a survey of absolutely dated early Slav sites in Northeast Germany. The article addresses the question of whether the chronological fixed-points for the early Slav epoch, predomin...

Berlin, Humboldt-Univ., Diss. A, 1987 (Nicht f.d. Austausch).