I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the UK dendrochronology is widely used for dating wood structures. In England they have a database that can date (some) trees back basically to any time of human existence in England. In Ireland their data goes back before 5000 BCE.
Mick "the Dig" Worthington who was the resident excavation supervisor on Time Team, went on to become an dendrochronologist and has built a series of base chronologies for the East Coast of America stretching from Maine down to Georgia:
Thanks Time Team. :)