Since the early medieval period wide and slow-moving Dzvina River (known as Zapadnaya Dvina in Russia and Daugava in Latvia) and its forested tributaries were key route to transporting timber from the upper Dzvina and Dnieper basins to Riga, and further to Western Europe. As a result, timber also from the territory of present-day Belarus appears in many European timber collections as “Baltic oak” and “Riga pines”. To trace this historic trade route and to further dating of undated wooden structures, we developed a new 831-year Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) tree-ring chronology (BY03b) using samples from living trees, historic, and archaeological timber from northern Belarus. These include samples from Polatsk and Vitsebsk archaeological excavations, historical buildings in Polatsk, and samples from Riga’s Dannenstern House which was built from the timber imported from the middle part of Dzvina basin. The BY03b chronology aligns well with modern tree-ring datasets from eastern Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and western Belarus, though these links weaken near the coast of the Baltic Sea. Our evidence suggests the pine timber trade between the upper and lower Dzvina / Daugava basin began in the 14th century and peaked in the 16th–17th centuries. As a result, many historical sites in Riga consist of timber from Belarus. In addition, timber from northern Belarus was used to build Danson House and Lytham Hall in the United Kingdom in the 18th century, located 2000 kilometers from the region of timber origins, confirming the very long-distance export of Belarusian timber throughout Europe. Thus, this new Belarusian multi-century pine chronology provides an exclusive basis for tracing precisely in time the trade connections of pine timber exported from the Dzvina / Daugava (and possibly Dnieper) basin to Western Europe via Riga in 14th – 19th centuries.
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