Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember a while back someone managed to build a many hundred year sequence of growth rings by analyzing all of the incremental construction in one town and aligning tree rings from one piece of wood with the same rings in newer or older pieces, using software not unlike reassembling DNA fragments, but with growth rings.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the UK dendrochronology is widely used for dating wood structures. In England they have a database that can date (some) trees back basically to any time of human existence in England. In Ireland their data goes back before 5000 BCE. Thanks Time Team. :)
Mick "the Dig" Worthington who was the resident excavation supervisor on Time Team, went on to become an dendrochronologist and has built a series of base chronologies for the East Coast of America stretching from Maine down to Georgia: