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.

Discovery of Romanesque remains under Saint-Paul cathedral, Li & egrave;ge-Belgium, simultaneous use of electrical resistivity, dielectric permittivity and GPR.

Since 1990 archaeologists, historians and dendrochronologists have worked on 128 sites in the Brussels-Capital Region. In addition to producing a typo-chronological inventory of wooden roof structures (12th–19th centuries), the studies have now extended to finishings and floor coverings, with an increasing focus being placed on the types of wood used. Although oak was the predominant material, especially before the 17th century, the resources used in Brussels and the surrounding villages were local. They came from three wooded areas, cleared or degraded to varying degrees: the Sonian Forest, state-owned forests, and hedgerows. Oak grows rapidly, with wide rings which make dendrochronological dating difficult, although this can be overcome by utilising more comparative data, employing carbon-14 dating, or knowing the historical context. The use of green wood has been confirmed, with unusual felling periods spread over two years. The sinuous profile of the fast-growing oaks was used to cut the knee braces in roofs over knee walls and porticoed wooden structures of monuments, urban housing, and vernacular architecture. Mediocre oak, or even wood from fruit trees, elm, or ash, was used for this kind of architecture. Moreover, from the 17th century onward, species other than oak began to appear in the roof frames of all buildings, especially after the centre of Brussels was bombarded in 1695. The typology of the reconstructed roof frames is the same as that prior to 1695, but a wider variety of woods were used to meet the high demand at the time of reconstruction. This diversity of species is more evident among floorboards, with poplar, elm, Scots pine, fir, and spruce being used. This may have been due to technical reasons, but, in the local context, it would also have been a question of using the precious oak of the Sonian Forest frugally.

L’archéologie du bâti est aujourd’hui une discipline de premier plan dans le paysage patrimonial bruxellois. La pression immobilière et la mise en place d’une réglementation urbanistique régionale inscrivant les interventions archéologiques dans les processus de rénovation et de restauration du patrimoine immobilier ont permis un essor très important de la discipline. L’administration en charge de l’archéologie multiplie les interventions tout en mettant en place une série de projets de recherches en collaboration avec des institutions scientifiques. Cette contribution entend présenter succinctement l’ensemble des projets de recherche et illustrer la richesse des résultats par la présentation d’un ensemble particulier de maisons récemment étudiées.

The exceptional preservation of the cityscape in the medieval city of Bruges (Belgium) triggered dendrochronological research on numerous preserved roof constructions in historical buildings, that date from the Middle Ages up to the early modern period. As many of these oak timbers lack the preservation of waney edge, a method was developed to combine sapwood estimates of felling dates within each building phase and to compute a summed probability distribution (SPD) for those felling dates. These summed probabilities now allow us to reconstruct temporal trends in building trade activity in an expanding medieval city. When linked to the social status of the patrons of the building projects, it is observed that resilience to demographic crisis and political turmoil differs among the social groups and political elite of a medieval society. Furthermore the dating results of decades of tree-ring research now provide a typo-chronological framework of roof constructions and shows that it took nearly two centuries before more advanced technological skill in the construction of roofs completely replaced the traditional common rafter roofs.

L’ensemble de textes ici reunis sous le titre Toitures et materiaux de couverture en Europe est issu de deux workshops et de nouvelles contributions proposees a l’occasion de leur reunion. Le premier, « Les toits de l’Europe : charpentes et materiaux de couverture », faisait partie du projet « Les toits de l’Europe ». Ce programme de recherche, porte par le Centre europeen d’archeometrie de l’universite de Liege et cofinance par l’Union europeenne, prog...

Les charpentes de l’Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles ont fait l’objet en 2004 d’une première étude dendro-archéologique menée par l’Université de Liège. Elle a établi que les différentes toitures couvrant le bâtiment ont été édifiées au cours de la période de reconstruction qui a suivi le bombardement du centre-ville en 1695. Dans le cadre d’une convention entre la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale et le pôle de dendrochronologie ULg/IRPA, un complément d’analyse dendrochronologique des charpentes a été programmé début 2018 afin d’affiner la datation actuelle des structures. Une étude archéologique des éléments métalliques et un relevé des traces de la mise en œuvre des bois ont également été prévus, ceci afin d’améliorer notre connaissance de ces témoins du début du xviii e siècle.

This paper presents an analytical framework for classifying software tools and systems dealing with spatio-temporal information developed for applications in the cultural heritage field. These can be numerous and quite different from one another, depending for the purpose they were developed for. In order to assess if one of the already existing software tools and systems can be used or modified to fit our research goals, a list of needs was established. Starting from those, requirements were defined and the software tools and systems dealing with spatio-temporal information are then compared and evaluated based on those characteristics. This analytical framework is an important step in our research since using a tool that is not appropriate for the study object will not be able to provide valuable information to answer the main research questions.

During the past decade, the implementation of 3D visualization and Geographic Information System (GIS) in archaeological research has increased and is now well established. However, the combination of these two factors remains rather complicated when faced with archaeological data. Some of the characteristics of this discipline impose the development of applications that will be able to cope with all of the specificities of archaeological data. Our research aims to create an Archaeological Information System (AIS) that will gather all of the characteristics of an archaeological work. In order to develop such an AIS, our first step was to identify its purposes and consequently, the features that should be available to the users. As it is destined to help with archaeological research, it is therefore of the outmost importance that the particularities of such a study are also taken into account. Moreover, the AIS is intended to incorporate point clouds that serve as a base for the three-dimensional model. These 3D point clouds result from the use of photogrammetry and/or lasergrammetry and, at a later stage, will be inserted into a GIS similar structure. The archaeological data will then be linked to the relevant section of the 3D model. However, these various stages and during the development of the AIS itself, we will encounter a series of issues that require to be addressed in order to produce a working system. This paper aims to identify and define the AIS characteristics as well as the issues and obstacles that we are going to face so that this system becomes a functional tool for archaeological research.