Domestic forests and wood culture in the continental Euro-Atlantic region (1300 – 1600 CE): explaining change and redressing biased perspectives

Introduction

Woodlands in the continental Euro-Atlantic region became heavily exploited from the Late Middle Ages onwards. The timber demand of growing cities and fleets promoted changes in oak (Quercus sp.) forestry practices and long-distance timber trade, aiming to provide a fast and sustainable turnover of construction wood.

Changes in Timber Practices

Progressively, changes in timber-framed buildings and ship designs took place during the 15th and 16th centuries, concurrently with shifts in woodworking techniques. Whether and how these changes and shifts in wood culture were interrelated is still a debated question.

Challenges in Research

Dendrochronological datasets biased towards wood from old trees, limited archaeological records, and fragmented historiography have hampered finding the answer thus far.

Project Goals

WoodCulture aims to explain changes and redress biased perspectives about:

• Domestic forests
• Timber supply
• Building activity patterns
• Technological innovations in the continental Euro-Atlantic region during the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (c. 1300-1600 CE).

Methodology

I will retrieve the currently missing wood archive of young and fast-growing oaks from managed forests, along with its associated historical, technological, and environmental context. This will involve combining:

1. Isotope dendrochronology
2. Archaeology
3. History
4. 3D scanning
5. AI
6. GIS

Expected Outcomes

This ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach will provide a novel, empirically-founded narrative about changes in woodlands and interdependencies between timber products, construction designs, and technological innovations in the continental Euro-Atlantic region.

Sustainability of Domestic Forests

Moreover, it will reveal whether domestic forests became sustainable suppliers of construction timber at local/regional scales, putting the magnitude of timber trade into perspective.

Broader Impact

The developed set of tools will revolutionise fields of study beyond material heritage (history, archaeology, geography), allowing the systematic analysis of hitherto unstudied timbers in historic buildings and archaeological sites.