Bükkábrány and dendrochronology
MúzeumCafé 5.
Frequent reference is made to the dendrochronological analyses of the unique Bükkábrány swamp cypresses. Due to systematic silviculture, trees older than 120 years (except for a few protected items) are not found in Hungarian forests. Thus to know about the thickness of annual rings in relation to certain years we can go back only to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with living trees. However, the analysis can be applied to determine the age of a piece of wood (a beam, board, furniture or shipwreck item) found during an excavation or while researching a listed building. ‘All’ we have to do is measure the thickness of the annual rings in the remains and find the relevant section in our virtual “infinite tree” database showing when rings of the given thickness appeared in sequence. The procedure, which can provide results within an accuracy of about three months, has become a vital auxiliary science of archeology. What of the Bükkábrány trees? The trees truly had a long life (more than 450 rings were found in one tree of medium thickness). We can reconstruct the process whereby the river, which brought the muddy sand preserving the trees, slowly engulfed the living cypresses. Research will also reveal much about the life of the former forest, which dates back several million years and was possibly visited by Rudapithecus hungaricus. The research naturally requires the cooperation of a variety of specialists. Geologists, biologists, restorers, palaeontologists and dendrochronologists are working together, among them experts of the Hungarian Dendrochronology Laboratory and the Budapest Tree Ring Laboratory (Department of Palaeontology, Eötvös Lóránd University).