Mining the British Isles oak tree-ring data set. Part A: Rationale, data, software, and proof of concept

From stuttering early beginnings, archaeological oak dendrochronology in the British Isles developed rapidly in the latter decades of the 20th century, to the present situation where dozens of new crossdated site chronologies are produced each year. Although unevenly spread in both space and time, the available data set is now so large (several thousand sites) that it has the potential to be mined for applications that were not envisaged when the data were originally collected. Here we compile available data into an oak database of archaeological and modern (living) sites, develop a software tool to visualise spatial patterns and correlations, and explore six potential data-mining applications (crossdating methodology, crossdating error detection, regional chronologies, pointer years, provenancing, past climate reconstruction). Results indicate variable data-mining potential, but with viable prospects in each case.