The maximum is not just many hundred years. The Hohenheimer Jahrringkalender based on pine trees of central Europe goes back 12,460 years and people are working

The maximum is not just many hundred years. The Hohenheimer Jahrringkalender based on pine trees of central Europe goes back 12,460 years and people are working on extending it backwards another 2,000 years.[1] Such calendars are anchored in the present and require an unbroken backward chain of quality wood samples from the same region and the same tree species. The advantage of the new method based on Miyake events is that such events are so rare that they can be used to determine an anchor point in the past, provided that external evidence for a piece of wood can be used to make plausible a time period for it in which there was only one such event whose date is known from external evidence, such as ice core drills.[2] From this single Miyake event tree ring one can then work one's way forwards and backwards to establish a tree ring chronology that does not need to be anchored in the present. One can even imagine that in the future it might be possible to create such chronologies without a good time frame for a single Miyake event, if two Miyake events are found at a certain distance from each other in an otherwise unanchored tree ring chronology. [1] https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/viewFile/4172/3597 https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/arti... (PDF) [2] Confirmed Miyake events took place in 7176 BCE, 5259 BCE, 660 BCE, 774 CE and 993 CE. Other candidates for Miyake events are 12,350 BCE, 5410 BCE, 1052 CE and 1279 CE. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event