Dendrochronology
Defne Bozkurt, a Cornell student who we were fortunate to be able to borrow for a day from Dr. Omura and the Kamankale Höyük Excavations, supervised packing of the samples from Kerkenes for shipment to The Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology at Cornell University where Peter Kuniholm and his team are counting the annual growth rings. The wood is pine and, at the time of writing, the longest sequence is 197 rings which should extend the Cornell Bronze Age/Iron Age chronology downward by at least a century.

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/

Geology, Geomorphology and Hydrology
Catherine Kuzucuoglu, Mehmet Ekmekçi and Harun Aydin were able to identify the different types of rock, sandstones and chalk, which had been used in addition to the granite at Kerkenes (Fig. 61). Mehmet has written the draft of a detailed report on the hydrology of the Kerkenes Dag which explains how the water table is replenished and also describes the way in which the Iron Age reservoirs were filled by seepage. 2002 was the final season of a program of geomorphlogical coring in the surrounding region that aims at providing evidence for human impact on the landscape and, in particular, at documenting the effects of both building the Iron Age city and its violent destruction. The results of their laboratory analysis are eagerly awaited.