By Taylor Mitchell Brown , Science.  Excerpt: About 2200 years ago, a wealthy Han soldier was entombed in a hillside grave on the frontier of the expanding Han Dynasty, in what is now western China. His tomb was filled with gold coins and emblazoned with ornate calligraphy. But what most interested Bao Yang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and head of its Tree-Ring Laboratory was the wood of his coffin. For dendrochronologists like Yang, coffin wood can be a critical source of tree rings, which can help scientists date sites—sometimes to precise calendar years—and offer details about the region’s environment and climate during the tree’s lifetime. The thickness of rings from the Han soldier’s pine coffin and hundreds of others like it, for example,  revealed that from 270 B.C.E. to 77 C.E. average humidity levels were 18% to 34% higher than today’s, which may have allowed the western Han to expand westward  into what before—and is again today—a barren desert. That...

https://eos.org/features/finding-climate-history-in-the-rafters-of-new-york-city-buildings By Jenessa Duncombe , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: When renovating in the Big Apple, you might acquire a several-hundred-year-old climate database along with your new kitchen and bath. ...Hidden in wooden joists and beams in New York City’s oldest buildings is the largest repository of old-growth timber in the eastern United States, said Rao. These timbers can hold valuable information about past climates—but it can be uncovered only if scientists can get their hands on the timbers before they go to a landfill. ...Scientists and engineers  estimate  that 14,000 cubic meters of old-growth wood are removed from buildings in New York City (NYC) each year during demolitions or renovations; the city is continuously being remade. ...Dendrochronology emerged as a tool for studying past events in the late 1800s, when an astronomer, Andrew E. Douglass, recorded the patterns of wide and narrow rings o...