Dated trash, tree rings, and aerial photos can establish when contamination began.

Evidence

On the fifteen acres owned by Beatrice, Drobinski had dug into piles of debris and rusted 55-gallon drums, piles saturated with TCE. He had found a Woburn campaign sticker from 1963, a prescription bottle dated 1967, and Budweiser beer cans with tab tops of the sort that Budweiser said they had stopped making in 1970. He had chopped down a stunted tree growing out of one pile and sent cross-sections to a botanist, who determined that the tree, eighteen years old now, had started growing in 1967. Based on these discoveries, and especially aerial photographs from the 1950s and 1960s that clearly showed the piles of drums and debris, Drobinski would take the witness stand tomorrow and testify that the Beatrice property adjacent to the tannery had been contaminated for at least twenty-five years. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 1729

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: dating environmental crime without eyewitnesses — archaeologists’ toolkit (stratigraphy, dendrochronology, aird photos, consumer datable artifacts) applied to toxic torts and cold-case forensics.
• XREF: Connects to the archaeology-of-modern-garbage strand and to Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, where small material traces (a diary entry, a probate inventory) are used to reconstruct an otherwise undocumented life. — connects to: Tree rings function as interpretable historical records on the landscape. — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods: Seeing More in…, 116; Dated debris proves a dump’s age but not when the toxins arrived. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action , 1743

Broader Connections

• Tree rings function as interpretable historical records on the landscape. #corroborates (0.95) — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods, 116
• Dated debris proves a dump’s age but not when the toxins arrived. #complicates (0.90) — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 1743