Michael Worthington

Michael Worthington is a dendrochronologist with wide-ranging experience working on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the many buildings he has dated are the Josiah Henson Site (Uncle Tom's Cabin) and Doughoregan Manor in Maryland; Decatur House in Washington DC; Mount Vernon and many of the buildings in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia; the birthplaces of John Adams and John Quincy Adams and the Fairbanks House (the oldest surviving timber frame house in North America) in Massachusetts; the Officers' Club at the Presidio in San Francisco, California; and Windsor Castle, Westminster Abbey, and the Tower of London in England. He also enjoys working on smaller vernacular buildings, and has been commissioned by numerous homeowners in the US and Europe to date their houses privately. He has extensive media experience and has appeared on the American television series "History Detectives," where he dated an historic New England saltbox house.

Michael began his career in buildings as an industrial archaeologist at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum in Shropshire, England. He spent seven years as the excavation supervisor for the British television series "Time Team," where he was known by the nickname Mick the Dig. After deciding to specialize in dendrochronology, he received his academic training through a grant from English Heritage at the University of Oxford. At Oxford he was a member of staff at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art and an assistant tutor on the master's degree course in Archaeological Science. As a founder and partner in the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, he spent more than a decade building a series of base chronologies for the East Coast of America stretching from Maine down to Georgia. Upon moving full-time to the United States in 2010, Michael opened the Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory. He currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.

Affiliation: 

• Principal, Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory

Education:

• Personalized Program in Dendrochronology, University of Oxford
• Technician's Diploma Mechanical Engineerings, Telford College of Arts and Technology