Local timber dominated pre-industrial construction: Insights from archival and dendrochronological data

Abstract

In pre-modern Europe, timber was notoriously difficult and costly to transport on land, therefore it is usually assumed that ordinary buildings – except for those close to navigable watercourses – were constructed using timber from local sources. We hypothesized that species of timber used in constructions prior to the late 19th century were commonly available in forests within a short distance from the location of the constructions. To test this hypothesis, we compared high-resolution archival information on the tree species composition of forests in Moravia (eastern Czech Republic, ca. 27,000 km²) in the 18th and 19th centuries to a database of 1231 dated timber constructions in the same region and period. Our analysis was based on the mutual distances between the locations of timber constructions and the occurrences of forests with the given tree species. We compared real distances with distances obtained through random simulations. Results showed that in more than half of the cases, the tree species from constructions occurred in the forests of the same township. In the rest of the cases, the modal distance values to the centroid of the nearest township where the same species was present in the forests were usually less than two kilometres and distances larger than five kilometres were generally rare. While our results testify to the availability of timber rather than to the direct source of particular pieces of timber, they strongly suggest that timber was usually sourced locally. We believe our interdisciplinary study demonstrated the usefulness of archival data in the research of timber sourcing. For future studies, we see the combination of our approach with dendroprovenancing and other natural scientific methods as the most promising way to gain deeper knowledge on the sourcing of timber.