Natalya Borisovna was born in 1933 in Moscow and was one of the world’s leading experts in dendrochronology. She was one of the founders of environmental archaeology within the Soviet Union, and worked primarily in Russia and Eastern Europe. She graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow in 1957 with a dissertation on medieval Novgorod (10th-16th centuries) which she swiftly published in 1958. For a few years she worked as an assistant in the Department of Archaeology at Moscow State University as well as on excavations led by the Institute of Archaeology within the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
In 1961 she joined the newly formed dendrochronology group which at the time was led by B.A. Kolchin, who headed the natural science laboratory within the Institute of Archaeology. She worked in the dendrochronology lab for nearly half a century until her death in 2006. In 1984 she rose to the head of the laboratory. During her career she published 2 essential books on dendrochronology ,”Dendrochronology of Eastern Europe” (1977; co-authored with B.A. Kolchin), “Dendrochronology and Archaeology” (1996), and over 65 articles.
The impact of her work was massive- as i was before the widespread availability of radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology was one of the only reliable ways to obtain absolute dates for archaeological contexts. Her research, first on the wood from Novgorod, and then on materials from across Eastern Europe, created a dendrochronological scale for much of medieval Eastern Europe. During her career, the laboratory assembled some of the best reference collections available in the world with over 20,000 wood samples from a massive territory that included not only Russia but also Western Europe and the Arctic. Chernyk not only conducted her own groundbreaking research, but also trained the next generations of (female) dendrochronologists, including Olga Tarabardina and Marina Kulakova, who continue to work on medieval Russia and Eastern Europe today.
Post by Ashleigh Haruda
Image from https://arheologija.ru/karpuhin-kuzminyih-natalya-borisovna-chernyih-i-otechestvennaya-dendrohronologiya/ and used with permission.
