"In this desert environment, the settlers would not overlook the dead trees," Bekker said. "In fact there may be advantages to using post-mortem timber because you don�t have to take bark or twigs off and it�s already dried so it�s not going to warp anymore after you cut it."

Two trees with terminal rings dating 1846 intrigued Bekker because of a possibility that they had been cut by the Donner-Reed party, which was said to have cut timber while clearing a road in Emigration Canyon that the Mormon settlers followed one year later.

"There�s an outside chance that the Mormon pioneers came across cut timbers in Emigration Canyon and hauled them down on their way, or perhaps the drought was severe enough that year to have killed some trees," Bekker said. "That's one thing the walls won�t tell you."

Dead timber may also explain the rapid construction of an open-sided structure the Mormon settlers completed one week after their arrival. Several others were built before work on the Tabernacle began. Called "boweries" in the pioneer journals, these structures consisted of thatched roofs made of brush and willow boughs supported by wood beams. At least one pioneer journal documents a bowery on Temple Square being dismantled to so the lumber could be re-used, suggesting that the Tabernacle timbers could have been salvaged from these earlier structures.

"Taken as a whole, the study is an excellent example of the wide range of information that can be derived from structural wood," said University of Arizona professor Jeff S. Dean, an expert in the study of old buildings using tree-ring analysis. "The study shows how the interplay between tree-ring and historical data provides a much fuller range of information on past human behavior than can be achieved from either source by itself."

The renovation of the Tabernacle included the installation of modern support structures where these timbers once lay. Although hidden from view now by new walls and ceilings, some of the old timbers were bolted alongside the new steel beams to preserve a part of the building's historical context.