Marta Domínguez Delmás is a research associate at the University of Amsterdam. Her research centers on the historical timber trade and transport in Northern Europe and to the Iberian Peninsula since Roman times. This work involves dendrochronological dating and provenancing of timbers from ancient and historical archaeological contexts, buildings, and art objects; identification of European wood species; inspection and sampling of timbers from shipwrecks for dendrochronological research and wood anatomy; and the development of long-span tree-ring chronologies.
In 1629, the Batavia, a ship of the Dutch East India Company, met disaster off the coast of Australia. A new analysis of the shipwreck’s tree rings uncovers how such vessels were built to advance European colonialism.