Project description
Redefining perspectives on post-medieval wood culture in the Euro-Atlantic region
From the Late Middle Ages, increasing timber demands triggered changes in oak forestry, timber supply, and construction in the Euro-Atlantic region. These shifts coincided with developments in woodworking, though their connections remain unclear due to limited and biased data. The ERC-funded WoodCulture project will investigate changes in domestic forests, wood supply, building practices, and technology in the Euro-Atlantic region between 1300 and 1600 CE. By analysing timbers from fast-growing oaks in historic buildings and shipwrecks, and combining isotope dendrochronology, archaeology, 3D scanning, and AI, the project will reveal whether domestic woodlands sustained construction needs. Insights will contextualise timber trade and provide a new narrative about the connection between timber products and shifts in woodworking technology and designs, redefining perspectives on post-medieval wood culture and sustainability.
Objective
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. 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. Dendrochronological datasets biased towards wood from old trees, limited archaeological records, and fragmented historiography have hampered thus far finding the answer.
WoodCulture aims to explain changes on and redress biased perspectives about domestic forests, timber supply, building activity patterns and technological innovations in the continental Euro-Atlantic region during the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (c.1300-1600 CE). 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, combining isotope dendrochronology, archaeology and history with 3D scanning, AI and GIS.
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. 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. 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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographycartographygeographic information systems
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologydendrochronology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesforestry
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
2500 BJ Den Haag
Netherlands