Abstract: Wood archaeology research is an important basis to promote the natural and historical information mining, protection and restoration of wood relics. In recent years, with the rapid development of ancient DNA hybridization capture and sequencing technologies, it has become possible to obtain sequence information of highly degraded DNA fragments from woody remains. On the basis of wood anatomy, the innovative research on wood molecular archaeology with ancient DNA as the core has gradually become the focus and frontier of attention in wood archaeology. Therefore, this paper firstly reviews the research of the wood molecular archaeology, and then summarizes the research progress and problems of wood ancient DNA from three aspects: preservation and degradation, acquisition, data processing and sequence analysis. It also points out that the high degradation, low concentration, and chemical damage of ancient DNA make it difficult to extract and analyze. Then it summarizes the main applications of wood molecular archaeology in interpreting the ways of ancient people’s cognition and utilization of forest resources, restoring regional forest vegetation types and species diversity in historical periods, and reconstructing the microevolutionary responses of ancient trees to climate and habitat changes. Finally, we proposed three research topics which should be given priority in future: 1) establishment of the specimen collections of archeological woods and the corresponding DNA database. 2) Studying the laws of wood ancient DNA damage and its changes in different spatial and temporal dimensions. 3) Development of the stable and efficient technical system for extracting and analyzing wood ancient DNA. By further strengthening the interdisciplinary research of wood molecular archaeology, the application of new theories, methods and technologies in the field of wood science and archaeology is promoted, so as to provide scientific basis for the species identification, protection and utilization of wood cultural relics, and the reconstruction of the coupling relationship between forest vegetation, environmental climate and human activities in the historical period.

Key words: wood remains, ancient DNA, tree species, DNA extraction, DNA damage, molecular archaeology