Estimating Sapwood Counts for Historical Oak Timbers from Brussels, Belgium (13th–18th Century)

Ongoing dendrochronological studies on construction wood from the Brussels region (Belgium), a collaborative effort between the Brussels Capital Region (urban.brussels), the laboratories of the University of Liege, and the Royal Institute of Cultural Heritage, have resulted in a substantial corpus of 443 oak samples with waney edges or partially preserved sapwood. The examined wooden elements date back to the 13th to the 18th centuries, with 85% of them accurately dendrodated. This corpus enables the development of a novel regional framework for estimating the number of missing sapwood rings and consequently refines felling date estimates for timber constructions made of oak in the Brussels region. A key feature of this dataset is the diversity of timber sources, reflecting the complex supply networks of a large and expanding urban centre. The sapwood model presented herein was designed to encompass this diversity in timber provenance, offering a comprehensive tool for dendrochronologists, building historians, and archaeologists to derive and report reliable estimates of felling date ranges. Here, we present a newly developed sapwood model tailored for the Brussels region that estimates the expected number of sapwood rings to be between seven and 27 (95.7% confidence interval). This range was narrower than that of previously used estimates and published datasets, offering improved precision. Furthermore, the new sapwood model enables a standardised workflow for reporting felling date ranges for individual oak timbers

Felling · Java · Logging · Workflow · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · Globalization, Historical Perspectives, and International Relations · Memory, History, Trauma, Identity