Your question is pretty old, but I just wanted to add a real solution to your question. Here’s a function that will return an array of years you have posts published in. You can put this function in functions.php or in a plugin or whatever you want.
function get_posts_years_array() {
global $wpdb;
$result = array();
$years = $wpdb->get_results(
$wpdb->prepare(
"SELECT YEAR(post_date) FROM {$wpdb->posts} WHERE post_status="publish" GROUP BY YEAR(post_date) DESC"
),
ARRAY_N
);
if ( is_array( $years ) && count( $years ) > 0 ) {
foreach ( $years as $year ) {
$result[] = $year[0];
}
}
return $result;
}
You’ll need to modify it slightly for custom post types… just add AND wp_posts.post_type="my_cpt"
somewhere in there.