Subfossil Oaks from Riverine Sediments of the Seda River in Latvia: the First Results of Dendrochronological and Radiocarbon Analysis

The article presents a dendrochronological investigation of subfossil oaks from the riverine sediments of the Seda River in the Lake Burtnieki Undulating Plain, northern Latvia. Thirty-nine oak trunks were investigated for our study. Cross-dating of samples resulted in six floating chronologies spanning 141–636 years. The longest chronology was absolutely dated to AD 652–1287 against regional oak chronologies from Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and central European Russia. 14C dating revealed that oaks grew on the site from the last century of the third millennium cal BC to the first half of the second millennium cal AD. We assessed the depositional anomalies from two best-replicated chronologies. The germination of oaks occurred during climate warming, and dying-off phases were triggered by climate cooling and increased precipitation throughout Europe. Our results give new insights into the forest history in northern Latvia and provide a potential to construct absolute-dated millennial oak chronologies in the Baltic countries.