  We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for consistent root
reconstruction in continuous-time Markov models with countable state space on
bounded-height trees. Here a root state estimator is said to be consistent if
the probability that it returns to the true root state converges to 1 as the
number of leaves tends to infinity. We also derive quantitative bounds on the
error of reconstruction. Our results answer a question of Gascuel and Steel and
have implications for ancestral sequence reconstruction in a classical
evolutionary model of nucleotide insertion and deletion.
