By analyzing tree rings from a shipwreck, we know the tale of the Dolphin from Rhode Island — a whaling ship built in 1850 and lost less than a decade later.
Enter Ignacio Mundo, a dendrochronologist with Argentina’s Laboratory of Dendrochronology and Environmental History. “The first thing was to convince the archaeologists that we need to have cross sections,” says Mundo, first author of the lateststudy. This was no small feat: Those sections of timber — necessary to accurately date the wood – nevertheless involved damaging archaeological evidence.
Once researchers had cut and analyzed these sections, they consulted a vast database run by scientists at the Columbia Climate School to determine that the wood originated in New England and the Southeastern U.S. Further analysis revealed the trees were cut down in or before 1849, one year before theThe whaler was probably built and put to sea only roughly less than nine months after the trees were felled — a short amount of time in that period.
From around 1770 to the 1860s, New England was a hub for whalers, who set out to capture cetaceans and their blubber. This was then boiled down and turned into oil. Eventually, however, demand for oil and whalebones led to the decline of whale populations — and with it, the whaling industry.is the first Patagonian shipwreck to be studied archaeologically, Grosso adds. “These kinds of studies are important in order to analyze whaler activities in Patagonia.
“We don’t know whether the ships were coming close to the shore to hunt whales, to take on provisions like water, or exchange with indigenous inhabitants along the coast. There are different possibilities,” Murray says. Yet all the researchers agree that further discoveries remain to be made along the harsh and remote Patagonian coast.