Chair of Forest Ecology and Forest Management, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Wageningen Environmental Research, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2020 Nov 23;10(1):20316. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-77387-2.
Oak wood was highly appreciated and widely used for construction in past centuries. As population sizes expanded in some regions of Europe, local forests were depleted of high-quality timber. Therefore, regions of soaring economies were importing timber initially from the European market and eventually from other continents. Origin of archaeological or historical timber is usually identified by means of dendroprovenancing, i.e. statistical matching of tree-ring-width (TRW) series of timber of unknown origin with TRW reference datasets. However, this method has pitfalls and limitations and therefore alternative techniques are needed. Here, we used three different DNA analysis methods to investigate the potential of using ancient (a)DNA, extracted from oak timber derived from historical buildings and shipwrecks from a variety of countries. All the material had also been analysed dendrochronologically, so its dating and provenance is demonstrated. We included heartwood samples in this analysis, for which DNA extraction is especially challenging as it contains chemicals that inhibit DNA amplification. We succeeded in amplifying DNA for at least one marker from 56% of samples (including heartwood samples), yielding crucial information that allowed us to identify the potential source area of centuries old timber buildings in Latvia and Denmark and of 750-year-old shipwreck material from Germany. Our results prove the strong potential of DNA analyses for identifying timber origin to the regional scale, but by combining these with the dendrochronological results, we can control the exactitude of the aDNA approach and demonstrate a more nuanced examination of the timber sources for these historic structures.
在过去几个世纪里，橡木因其高品质而备受推崇，被广泛用于建筑。随着欧洲一些地区人口的增长，当地的森林逐渐耗尽了优质木材。因此，经济蓬勃发展的地区最初从欧洲市场进口木材，最终从其他大陆进口木材。考古或历史木材的起源通常通过树木年代学鉴定来确定，即通过统计匹配未知起源的木材的树木年轮宽度（TRW）系列与 TRW 参考数据集。然而，这种方法存在缺陷和限制，因此需要替代技术。在这里，我们使用了三种不同的 DNA 分析方法来研究从历史建筑和沉船中提取的古代（a）DNA 分析方法的潜力，这些沉船来自不同的国家。所有的材料都经过了树木年代学分析，因此可以证明其年代和起源。我们将心材样本也纳入了分析范围，因为从心材中提取 DNA 特别具有挑战性，因为心材中含有抑制 DNA 扩增的化学物质。我们成功地从 56%的样本（包括心材样本）中扩增出了至少一个标记的 DNA，这为我们提供了关键信息，使我们能够确定拉脱维亚和丹麦的几个世纪前的木材建筑以及德国的 750 年历史沉船材料的潜在来源地区。我们的研究结果证明了 DNA 分析在确定木材来源方面具有很强的潜力，可以达到区域尺度，但通过将这些结果与树木年代学结果相结合，我们可以控制 aDNA 方法的准确性，并更细致地研究这些历史结构的木材来源。
