CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The absence of precise dates in Extremadura´s Renaissance heritage can generate ambiguities that hinder thecultural interpretation of regional history. The analysis of the duration of the art styles, the date of constructionof buildings and artefacts or the exact determination of restoration periods are severely affected by the absenceof specific chronological information. Dendrochronology can help to resolve these unknowns. We analysedhistorical woods from timbers, painting panelings, ceilings, furniture and art objects, all from two Renaissancemonumental buildings: the San Vicente Ferrer church in the city of Plasencia and the Las Veletas palace inCáceres, both in Spain. We used a local chronology of living trees as reference. This living chronology wasdeveloped with tree-ring data hosted in the International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) but reinforced withrecent wood samplings from the Sierra de Gredos, a mountainous area close to the historic sites. After a step-by-step crossdating process, the historical timbers were dated and a floating chronology was built. The comparisonbetween this floating chronology and that obtained from living trees reached a Pearson-r correlation of 0.65 witha temporal overlap of 106 years. Thus the living tree-ring chronology was extended 253 years into the past (from1769 CE to 1516 CE), allowing the dating of new historical materials that may arise in the future for this periodand confirming that tree-ring dating is a feasible technique to use in the dating of historic buildings and artefactsin western Spain. The results indicate that it is feasible to admit that Mudejar art, a mixture of Arab and Christianstyles, remained in active development in Extremadura for much longer than in any other regions of Spain.