Cedar of Lebanon (Made in Anatolia): Dendroprovenancing Timbers in the Late Ottoman Port of Jaffa

The Anatolian cedar forests were an important source of timber for the Ottoman Empire, particularly in timber-starved provinces like Palestine and Egypt.  I present here results from a study using dendrochronology to date and provenance cedar timbers from two 19th century Ottoman buildings in the Palestinian port of Jaffa.  These results, combined with information from the historical record and dendrochronological data from other Ottoman sites in the eastern Mediterranean, demonstrate that these cedars were imported from Anatolia and were part of a far-reaching maritime and overland trade network throughout the Ottoman Empire.Brita Lorentzen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geological Sciences at Cornell University.  She first became interested in dendrochronology when she started working as an undergraduate research assistant for Peter Kuniholm in 2004 and worked as a lab technician in the Cornell Tree-Ring Lab for a year before beginning her graduate studies.  Her dissertation, which she will defend this spring, will discuss her research in the southern Levant (specifically Israel and Jordan), which investigates the climate-driven variability in the tree-ring records of the northern and southern Levant and how to use dendrochronological methods to date and provenance historical and archaeological sites in Israel and Jordan more effectively.  She has also worked on or assisted lab research projects in Turkey, Cyprus, Crete, northeast North America, and especially Tomasz Wazny's projects in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.  She is a staff member of the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project excavations in Israel, the Cyprus Archaeomagnetic Project, and the Wadi Feynan excavations in Jordan.