Exploring the origins of Late Medieval construction timber in Central France through hierarchical clustering

Late Medieval Limoges (Haute-Vienne department, Central France) represents an example of medium-sized city that relied on timber resources for e.g., construction, heating and crafting. Timber-framed buildings are abundant in the city centre, and although it is generally assumed that the wood used in these structures was sourced locally, historical records lack specific details in this regard. The aim of this study was to gain insight into the organisation of the timber ly for construction purposes in Limoges, a town surrounded by woodlands and connected by rivers to a hinterland of timber sources, using dendrochronological methods. To this end, we sampled 212 oak (Quercus sp.) wooden elements from 13 historic timber-framed houses and used a Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) approach to identify the origin of wood. Indeed, the HCA can offer insight into the origin of timbers of unknown provenance by grouping them with timbers of known provenance. No clear evidence of timber rafting was observed on the sampled elements. The collected material provided a 419-year-long tree-ring chronology spanning from 1317 to 1735 C.E. Tree-ring analyses revealed that most of the targeted houses date back to the 15th century, and that most of the timber originated from woodlands located in the Haute-Vienne department, within a 50-km radius around the city of Limoges. These results support the assumption that the wood was sourced locally. However, the study does not allow to determine more precisely the origin of individual timbers, highlighting the complexity of wood provenance studies at a local scale in densely forested areas with low environmental variation, such as Central France. We expect future studies combining geochemical tracers with tree-ring analysis to improve the spatial accuracy of the dendroprovenancing analysis presented here.