Sourcing timber in pre-industrial Central Europe: the combined evidence of dendrochronology and archival information

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. Results showed that in more than half of the cases, tree species from constructions occurred in the forests of the same township. If not, the modal distance values to the centroid of the nearest township where the same species was present in the forests was 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.