Arqueometría del patrimonio cultural: cronología, tecnología y ambiente del último milenio

Archaeometry1K aims to unveil the cultural and technological adaptations that took place in the Euro-Atlantic façade throughout the last millennium and their possible relationship with the scarcity of wood resources and the climate at specific times. Wood has been the main construction and fuel material since prehistory and until the industrial revolution. In North-Atlantic Europe, oak (Quercus sp.) was a preferred species given its high-quality and abundance, and is therefore found in cultural heritage objects and sites from all pre-industrial periods. Tree-rings in wood are fingerprints of the climatological and ecological conditions prevailing at the sites where trees grow, and they also reflect anthropogenic actions carried out in individual trees or forest stands, such as logging activities or pruning practices. These fingerprints are unique for a given species growing at a specific site, therefore tree -ring chronologies can be used to provide absolute dates for historic timbers, to locate the origin of historic wood, and reconstruct past forest history and climate. Once timbers are placed in a specific temporal and geographical framework, information about timber supply, trade, deforestation, forest management practices, technological developments and environmental conditions can be placed in specific spatiotemporal contexts. Therefore, wood preserved in a range of cultural heritage objects (e.g. historic buildings, shipwrecks, art, and furniture) represents material evidence that can be studied using dendrochronology methods. However, current tree-ring datasets are biased towards samples with many rings (>100), and crucial information about the selection of young or fast-grown trees for specific uses, or the implementation of historical forestry practices directed to obtain a fast turnover of timber products is disregarded and lost. Key long-standing questions to be addressed are: when did the changes observed in ship designs and wood working techniques in the Euro-Atlantic façade occur, and what triggered them: were they due to the lack of suitable timber assortments, or to the evolution of technology for timber conversion? How did the woodlands in the procurement areas change due to the exploitation of their timber resources? When did forestry practices start being used? What was the influence of climate in those designs and environments? Archaeometry1K will implement an interdisciplinary approach combining dendrochronological analyses (annually resolved tree-ring and stable oxygen isotope chronologies), maps of strontium isotope ratios, and digital archaeological methods to compile material evidence of the available timber products for construction purposes in the Euro-Atlantic façade (north of Spain, France and Germany, Belgium, Netherlands), their provenance, and the wood working and processing techniques from the late middle ages until the industrial revolution (c. 1100-1800). The datasets developed will allow the dating and provenancing of cultural heritage made of wood (predominantly oak) in the Euro-Atlantic façade, thereby providing an exact chronology for the thusfar unresolved relationship between timber resources, deforestation, technological developments and climate in North-Atlantic Europe during the past millennium. Data compiled from the different disciplines will be combined into an open source GIS-based database to allow spatiotemporalanalyses..