Incremental dating techniques allow the construction of year-by-year annual chronologies, which can be temporally fixed (i.e., linked to the present day and thus calendar or sidereal time) or floating.
Patterns in tree-ring growth can be used to establish the age of old wood samples, and also give some hints to local climatic conditions.
This technique is useful to about 9,000 years ago for samples from the western United States using overlapping tree-ring series from living and dead wood.
This signal can be detected and sequences recorded, and in the case of volcanic rocks, tied to radiometric dates.
Another technique used by archaeologists is to inspect the depth of penetration of water vapor into chipped obsidian (volcanic glass) artifacts.