Besides the application of comprehensive chronologies for beech and oakwood used dating of art objects, more recently it has become possible to establish tree-ring chronologies also for spruce wood, which are now employed especially in the dating of stringed instruments. The bellies of the stringed instruments, mostly manufactured from spruce wood, frequently are comprised of between 100 and 200 annual rings. These tree ring series represent a sufficiently large period of time to allow the relative and absolute dating of the wood. Altogether 50 stringed instruments were investigated and assigned to their time of origin. The recurrence of certain characteristic ring sequences confirms that in most cases the wood used for thetreble and bass part of the belly came from the same tree. In addition to the absolute dating, some information about wood storage and drying was also obtained. See also AATA 18-1265. -- AATA