Peter Kuniholm

Peter Ian Kuniholm started the Aegean Dendrochronology Project as a one-man Ph.D. dissertation research project in 1973 in the basement of the Ankara Museum. Peter also founded the Cornell Dendro lab when he subsequently came to Cornell in 1976. In the three decades since, Peter created a new field: archaeological dendrochronology of the Mediterranean and Near East. His work has profoundly changed approaches and thinking in several areas and fields.

Peter began with a study of Iron Age conifers in Phrygia and the Anatolian highlands, and work since has expanded greatly into a larger, much broader research enterprise. The Lab work now involves the building of tree-ring chronologies for a number of species of trees spread over the Eastern Mediterranean from Georgia on the fringe of the Caucasus to selected parts of Italy, from the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus and the cedars of north Lebanon to trees growing in the former Yugoslavia and parts of Bulgaria. This includes all of Turkey and all of Greece including Crete.

Degrees

• Brown University, A.B. English, 1958
• Vanderbilt University, A.M. English, 1963
• University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Classical Archaeology, 1977