The Museum of the Wood Age

By Max Adams

A passionate and imaginative exploration of wood – the material that shaped human history.

As a material, wood has no equal in strength, resilience, adaptability and availability. It has been our partner in the cultural evolution from woodland foragers to engineers of our own destiny. Tracing that partnership through tools, devices, construction and artistic expression, Max Adams explores the role that wood has played in our own history as an imaginative, curious and resourceful species.

Beginning with an investigation of the material properties of various species of wood, The Museum of the Wood Age investigates the influence of six basic devices – wedge, inclined plane, screw, lever, wheel, axle and pulley – and in so doing reveals the myriad ways in which wood has been worked throughout human history. From the simple bivouacs of hunter-gatherers to sophisticated wooden buildings such as stave churches; from the decorative arts to the humble woodworking of rustic furniture; Max Adams fashions a lattice of interconnected stories and objects that trace a path of human ingenuity across half a million years of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788543491

Max Adams

Max Adams is the author of In the Land of Giants and The Viking Wars, both available from Pegasus Books. A university professor, Max lives in the northeast of England.

Book preview

cover.jpg

THE MUSEUM OF THE

WOOD AGE

img1.jpg

ALSO BY MAX ADAMS

Admiral Collingwood

The King in the North

The Wisdom of Trees

In the Land of Giants

Ælfred’s Britain

Unquiet Women

The Little Book of Planting Trees

Trees of Life

The First Kingdom

THE MUSEUM OF THE

WOOD

AGE

MAX ADAMS

cover.jpg

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd,

part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Max Adams, 2022

The moral right of Max Adams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781788543507

ISBN (E): 9781788543491

Image credits: F11, 17, 40, 51 – Bridget Gubbins;

F 36, 37, 48 – Wikimedia Commons;

F39 – Simon Fraser University Digitized Collection;

all other images the author’s own.

Linocuts by Sarah Price

Head of Zeus Ltd

First Floor East

5–8 Hardwick Street

London EC1R 4RG

WWW

.

HEADOFZEUS

.

COM

For Sarah

Pursue wisdom like a hunter,

and lie in wait on her paths.

He who peers through her windows

will also listen at her doors;

He who encamps near her house

will also fasten his tent peg to her walls

Apocrypha: Ben Sirach 14: 22–24

I then gathered for myself staves and props and

tie-shafts, and handles for each of the tools that

I knew how to work with, and cross-bars and beams

and, for each of the structures which I knew how

to build, the finest timbers I could carry.

King Ælfred the Great

Contents

Also by Max Adams

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

A Wood Age Timeline

1   The Museum of the Wood Age

2     Ecologies

3     Physics

4     Transformations – Carpenters

5     Frame works

6     Transformations – Wheelwrights

7     Transformations – Firebringers

8     Wave-riders

9     Complex devices

10   Complex cultures

11   Simple things

12   Transformations – The end of the Wood Age

13   The cutting edge

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Endnotes

Note on the type used on the cover

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

A Wood Age Timeline

In Years Before Present (BP)

3.3m Earliest knapped stone artefacts, Kenya.

2.6m Earliest stone tools produced by humans, Ethiopia.

2.1m Emergence of Homo habilis: the first tool user.

1.87m Emergence of Homo erectus: the first bipedal ape.

1.8m Homo erectus first migrates from Africa into Europe and Asia.

1.7m Earliest stone hand axes in Tanzania: the Acheulean tool culture.

900k Earliest evidence for deliberate use of fire, in a cave at Wonderwerk, Kalahari, South Africa.

600k Emergence of Homo heidelbergensis.

500k Earliest stone-tipped spears in use for hunting large game, Kathu Pan, S. Africa; early human (Homo heidelbergensis) occupants of British Isles found at Boxgrove, West Sussex. The hominin lineages that lead to Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis split.

500–300k Earliest digging stick, Kalambo Falls, Tanzania.

450k Emergence of Homo neanderthalensis, a cold-adapted species.

400–380k Hoxnian Interglacial period. Oldest wooden weapon: the Clacton spear, Essex, UK.

400–200k Evidence of repeated hearth use and cooking at Qesem Cave, Israel.

330–300k Cache of spears and hafted tools from Schöningen, Germany.

315–300k Origins of Neanderthal Levalloisian ‘toolkit’ technique: the multi-purpose flint core.

250–200k Emergence of modern humans: Homo sapiens.

130–100k Earliest deliberate ritual burials, Israel.

115k Beginning of Last Glacial Period.

110k Extinction of Homo erectus.

140–50k Crafted yew digging stick from Aranbaltza III site, Bilbao, Spain.

72k Earliest evidence of image-making, engraved in red ochre, Blombos Cave, South Africa.

65k Arrival of humans in Australia by sea.

64k Oldest arrowhead: Sibudu Cave, South Africa.

60–40k Earliest known Neanderthal remains from Britain at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.

45–40k Arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe: Homo sapiens sapiens; widespread innovation in stone tool preparation techniques; possible use of spear-throwers. Earliest use of hafted axe from Australia.

43–35k Oldest surviving musical instruments, made of animal bone, from Germany.

42k Earliest fishing hooks, East Timor.

38k Extinction, or genetic swamping, of Homo Neanderthalensis.

33k Earliest human settlement in the Americas, Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico.

30k Earliest woven fabric (flax), Georgia.

23k Possibly the oldest human shelters, excavated at Ohalo II site on shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, Jordan. Twisted fibre cordage also recovered.

22k Last Glacial Maximum.

20k Earliest pottery vessel, Xianrendong Cave, China; domestication of dogs; oldest sound-making instrument, a bull-roarer from Ukraine. Earliest known human cremation, excavated near Lake Mungo, New South Wales, Australia.

14.6–11.6k Oldest evidence for preparation of cooked grain bread, from Natufian site of Shubayqa 1, Jordan.

12.9k Younger Dryas ice advance begins, lasting c.1,200 years.

12k Carving of the Shigir idol, Russia.

Dates Before Common Era (BCE)

9600 Beginning of the Holocene period; widespread retreat of ice sheets begins. Warm, wet phase in Sahara: first ceramic vessels known from Africa – the Bandiagara plateau, Mali. Construction of dwellings and hut shelters and possible oldest intact hunting bow at Star Carr, East Yorkshire.

9400 Sowing of wild barley and oats near the villages of the Fertile Crescent.

9000 Earliest continuous settlement, at Jericho, Palestine. Oldest intact arrow shafts, excavated at Stellmoor, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Melos obsidian of this period found on Peloponnese, demonstrating island-hopping sea contact in the Cyclades; Cyprus possibly settled by boat.

8500 Earliest domestication of sheep and goats, Fertile Crescent and Turkey.

8000 Domestication of cattle from wild aurochs, Near East and Indus Valley; cultivation of wheat; oldest hollow-log boat, the Pesse dugout canoe, Hoogeveen, Netherlands.

7800 Construction of a ‘tipi’ dwelling and hearth at Howick on the Northumberland coast, England.

7000 Earliest intact one-piece hunting bows, of elm, Holmegårds Mose, Zealand, Denmark.

6500 Increased exploitation of ‘native’ copper gives rise to a ‘Copper Age’ or Chalcolithic period in SW Asia. Lead beads cast at Çatalhöyük, Anatolia, where ovens and hearths for cooking also appear.

6000 The beginning of the ‘Secondary Products Revolution’. Oldest known canoe from Asia: excavated at Kuahuqiao, Zhejiang province, China. Oldest known canoe from Africa: from Dufuna, River Yobe, Nigeria.

5500 Beginning of so-called LBK (Linearbandkeramik) Neolithic central European culture (to c.4500).

5255 Wooden well constructed at Ostrov, Czech Republic.

c.5087 Neolithic wells survive from Eythra in eastern Germany, lined with notched and pegged mortise-and-tenon jointed battens. Many others are constructed over the following centuries in central Europe’s LBK culture.

4500 Copper/arsenical bronze axe manufacture possible (evidence from Tepe Yahya, Iran). First tin-bronze alloy known from Vinča, Serbia.

c.3900 Construction of a wooden trackway at Belmarsh, SE London.

3900–3600 Earliest pictorial depiction of an Egyptian boat: a double-ended raft or canoe with paddles depicted on pottery bowl. Naqada I phase, Egypt.

3807 Construction of the Sweet Track wooden causeway, Somerset Levels, UK.

3500 Development of first wool-bearing sheep, both in Steppes/Caucasus of SW Asia; oldest wheeled vehicles, central Asian Steppes, evidenced by designs on pottery at Bronocice, Poland. Domestication of horses in or near Kazakhstan, central Asia, by this date. First bronze tools appear.

3500–3000 First evidence of ploughing: ard scratch marks at Bubeneč, Czech Republic.

3400–3300 Death of Ötzi the ‘Iceman’, in Austrian Alps.

3300–2900 Oldest surviving complete wheels, from Bal’ki Kurgan, Ukraine.

3200 Pictorial evidence of reed bundle boats from Uruk, Mesopotamia.

3100 Oldest pottery wheel (there is older wheel-thrown pottery), Ur, Iraq. Oldest metal handsaws, from the tomb of Pharaoh Djer at Umm El Qa‘āb, Abydos, Egypt.

3000 Surviving fish weir structure, Sebasticook Lake, Maine. Earliest evidence for widespread manufacture of bronze tools, and weapons and figurative sculpture in Eurasia, and for the use of an updraft kiln.

c.2600 Oldest surviving intact boat: the ‘solar barge’ of Khufu (Cheops); oldest depiction of a sail. First archaeologically attested use of plywood construction in a coffin at Saqqara, Giza, Egypt.

2300–1750 ‘Dancing girl’ bronze sculpture from Mohendro Daro, Indus Valley (found in 1926).

2100 Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of literature.

2050 Cuneiform tablet from Umma, Iraq, records receipt of beer from a brewer.

2049 Construction of ‘Seahenge’ wooden circle, Hunstanton, Norfolk, UK.

2000 Earliest spoked wheel, Krivoye Lake, SE Russia; early model of two-ox plough, Middle Kingdom, Egypt. Depiction of possible ‘bundle’ (of reeds) boat on a seal from Mohenjo-Daro on the River Indus. Copper mined at Great Orme, North Wales.

1981–1975 Egyptian tomb of Meketre contains painted wooden model of a bakery and brewery.

1900 First evidence for spoked-wheel chariots at Sintashta, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia.

1800 The earliest surviving sewn-plank rowing vessels from Europe, the Ferriby boats, E. Yorkshire.

1500 The earliest seagoing vessel surviving from Europe, the Dover boat.

c.1323 Pharaoh Tutankhamun buried with six chariots – the apogee of ancient wheeled vehicle technology.

1300 Earliest lathe, from Egypt or Mycenae, probably a bow lathe.

1200–1000 Samaveda text from India first records a musical melody.

1100 Must Farm, Cambridgeshire, roundhouses built in Cambridgeshire Fens, UK; artefacts include eel traps, boats, a wooden box for a pair of shears and the oldest intact wheel in the UK.

c.700 Greek poet Hesiod tells the story of how the Titan Prometheus stole the secret of fire from Zeus and gave it to humans that they might liberate themselves.

600 Invention of the cam, or offset shaft, in mechanisms in China, used in automated bells and clocks.

c.300 Invention of water-driven toothed gear wheel in Greece; described by Philo of Byzantium in the Pneumatica and Parasceuastica; Indian text Panchatantra mentions use of Saqiyah (wheeled water lift) in irrigation schemes; composition by Theophrastus of Peri Phyton Historia (Enquiry into Plants). Euclid of Alexandria writes thirteen books of Elements. Birth c.287 of Archimedes of Syracuse.

200 Han dynasty (202

BCE

–220

CE

): complex gear mechanisms in use in China; tilt hammer used in pounding.

150 Foundation of the lake village settlement at Glastonbury, Somerset Levels.

100 Oldest surviving wooden musical instrument: six hand-carved wooden pipes from Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland.

0 Vitruvius writes De Architectura. Includes descriptions of waterwheels and mill workings. Construction of sixteen overshot watermills at Barbegal, Arles, France. Virgil composes Georgics in 29

BCE

.

Common Era Dates (CE)

9 Calliper gauge with slot and pin known from China, Xin dynasty.

31 Invention of water-powered metallurgical blowing engine, China.

c.50 Final abandonment of Glastonbury lake village, Somerset Levels.

77 Publication of the first ten books of Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder.

79 Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Italy.

105 Invention of paper announced by Cai Lun, director of Imperial Workshops, Han dynasty, China; porcelain now being made in China.

c.150 Date of preserved cart or wagon wheel from Roman fort at Newstead, Roxburghshire, UK.

c.200–300 Composition of the Arthashastra, an Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft which includes wildlife and forestry provisions.

c.320 Burial in Danish bog of the clinker-built Nydam 2 boat, 23 metres long of oak, the oldest known rowing vessel in NW Europe.

386 Construction begun of St Paul’s Basilica, Rome, with a triangular truss span of 82 feet. It stands until 1823, when it burns down.

552 Official arrival of Buddhist faith in Japan, Asuka period.

607 Founding of Hōryū-ji Buddhist complex, Ikaruga, Japan. The oldest timbers from its five-storey pagoda were felled in 594.

610 Emperor Yang of the Chinese Sui dynasty has a great wheeled wagon built for him, said to be able to carry hundreds of people.

619 Construction of horizontal turbine tide mill at Nendrum monastery on Strangford Lough, County Down, Northern Ireland.

c.650 Christian noblewoman buried in her bed at Trumpington, Cambridgeshire, UK.

c.650–900 Late Classic period of Mesoamerican culture, which may have produced the earliest wheel-mounted animal figurines in the Americas; more certain in Early Post-Classic period after 900.

687 Death and burial of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. His decorated wooden coffin, which survives, dates from 698 when he was exhumed and his remains ‘translated’.

711 Oldest standing wooden structure, the kondo or main hall at Hōryū-ji, reconstructed.

c.750 Knowledge of papermaking arrives in Europe from Samarkand.

752 Opening of Great Buddha Hall at Tōdai-ji, Nara, Japan. The largest wooden building in the world (until 1919).

c.800 Pachacamac idol, once thought to have been destroyed by order of Francisco Pizarro, made for Inca Painted Temple, near modern Lima, Peru; construction of 21-metre-long Viking longship, later buried at Oseberg, Norway (see under 834).

804 Timber bridge constructed across the River Shannon at Clonmacnoise monastery, County Offaly, Ireland.

820 Earliest European reference to a cam from the monastery of St Gall, eastern Switzerland, in the ‘Plan of St Gall’ and the Casus Sancti Galli. Used to crush grain for brewing.

834 A Norse longship containing the bodies of two women, their beds, sleds, waggons and many other wooden artefacts, is buried at Oseberg, Vestfold County, Norway.

c.900 A Norse longship is buried with a man and various grave goods at Gokstad, Sandar, Vestfold, Norway; copper-smelting furnaces working at the Sicán site of Huaca del Pueblo Batán Grande in north-west Peru. Cams driving hammers introduced in Europe for fulling, forging, tanning etc.

c.980 Mujing ‘Timberwork Manual’ attributed to Yu Hao, a guo gong or master carpenter in Imperial China (Song dynasty).

1050 Probable construction date for the stave-built church at Greensted, Essex.

c.1077 Possible date for the completion of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of Britain.

1086 c.6,000 mills are listed in Domesday Book, most driven by waterwheels.

c.1110 Yingzao Fashi (營造法式) Treatise on Architectural Models written by Li Jie, China, Song dynasty.

c.1150 Pueblo Bonito, the ‘great house’ of Chacoan culture in SW United States, is abandoned. Chacoans imported an estimated 200,000 trees from the Chuska Mountains, some 75 kilometres to the west, over two centuries.

1180 Great Buddha Hall at Tōdai-ji destroyed by fire. Rebuilt 1195.

1185 Latest possible date for the introduction of windmills to Britain. Several are kn0wn by 1200.

c.1100 Construction of the Gol stave church now at the Norsk Folkemuseum at Bygdøy, Oslo.

1280 Earliest reference to a spinning wheel from Speyer, on the Rhine.

1301 Westminster Abbey’s coronation throne made for Edward II.

1348 First water-powered bellows for an iron furnace in operation at Liège, Belgium.

1350 First colonisation of Aotearoa (New Zealand) by Maori sailors from Polynesia.

1440 Johannes Gutenberg invents mechanical printing press.

1492 Cristóbal Colón’s 1492 exploratory journey across the Atlantic in flagship Santa Maria.

1567 Great Buddha Hall at Tōdai-ji destroyed by fire for a second time.

1590 Construction of the Great Bed of Ware, Hertfordshire, England.

1598 Timbers from a theatre in Shoreditch are relocated by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men company to the South Bank of the River Thames, where the Globe Theatre is constructed, opening in 1599. It burns down in 1613 and is rebuilt, finally closing in 1642.

c.1600 Floruit of Xu Guangqi, author of the Nong Zheng Quan Shu (Complete Treatise on Agriculture).

1611 Arthur Standish publishes The Commons Complaint, to protest the shortage of timber in Britain and encourage the widespread planting of trees.

1662 John Evelyn presents his major work of forestry management and conservation, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, to the Royal Society.

1709 Second major rebuilding of the Great Buddha Hall at Tōdai-ji, Nara, Japan.

1712 Thomas Newcomen installs his first atmospheric engine in the Black Country of the West Midlands at Conygree Coal Works, Tipton.

1725 Construction of Causey Arch, County Durham, England, by a mason, Ralph Wood.

1741 Giuseppe Guarneri makes the violin now known as the Vieuxtemps – which became the world’s most valuable instrument in 2013, selling for $16 million.

1749 Fan tail patented by Edmund Lee for windmills, to turn them automatically into the wind.

1759 John Smeaton experiments with windmill sails to discover ‘propeller’ blade, the optimal varied angle for sails.

1779 Construction of the first cast-iron arch bridge across the River Severn, Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK, by Abraham Darby III and John Wilkinson.

1782 James Watt patents his rotary steam engine.

1797 USS Constitution, a 44-gun heavy frigate, is launched in Boston Harbour, USA – the most sophisticated wooden man-of-war to see action.

1803 Installation of the first mechanical block-making machines at Portsmouth, UK, designed by Henry Maudslay, Samuel Bentham and Marc Brunel.

1854 Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, or Life in the Woods, foundation text of the modern conservation movement. Boston sailing ship Champion of the Seas breaks all records by covering 465 nautical miles in twenty-four hours on her maiden voyage.

1880 Discovery and excavation of the Gokstad ship, Sandar, Vestfold, Norway.

1888 First exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in the New Gallery, London.

1893 Viking, a replica of the Gokstad ship, is built and sailed from Bergen in Norway to America, to be exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago.

1901 Gustav Strickley publishes the first edition of The Craftsman magazine in the USA.

1903 The Wright Flyer, made of canvas-covered Sitka or giant spruce (Picea sitchensis), flies from Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA – the first powered heavier-than-air aeroplane. Designed and built by Wilbur and Orville Wright.

1904–5 Excavation of the Oseberg ship, Tønsberg, Vestfold, Norway.

1908 The Gamble House, exemplar of American craftsman design, built by Greene & Greene for David B. Gamble, Pasadena, California.

1911 Samuel Warren uncovers the Clacton ‘spear’ on an Essex beach.

1923 George Sturt publishes his classic account of a craftsman’s life, The Wheelwright’s Shop.

1925 The first forklift truck (1915) leads to the invention of modern palletised logistics. The patent for the pallet was held by Howard T. Hallowell.

1937 Excavation of the Ferriby 1 boat on the Humber estuary, England – dated to early second millennium

BCE

.

1943 Walter Rose publishes The Village Carpenter.

1946 John Stewart Collis publishes The Worm Forgives the Plough, an account of his wartime experiences working as a woodsman and agricultural labourer.

1947 Thor Heyerdahl’s successful Kon-Tiki expedition makes experimental balsa raft crossing of the Pacific Ocean.

1957 Stanley Freese publishes Windmills and Millwrighting.

1971 Kenneth Kilby publishes The Cooper and His Trade.

1987 Experimental Greek trireme Olympias built in Piraeus, near Athens.

1997 The New Globe Theatre opens near the site of the original Globe Theatre.

1998 ‘Seahenge’ is exposed on the Norfolk coast and excavated.

2001 Ben Law constructs the ‘Woodland House’ in West Sussex, filmed for Channel 4’s Grand Designs. Zarif Mukhtarov builds a new water-powered paper mill at Koni Ghil, Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to process mulberry bark into paper.

2009 Construction of the Stadthaus, Murray Grove, London – at the time the tallest wooden residential structure in the world.

2011 Artist Grayson Perry creates the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman for an exhibition at the British Museum, London.

2013 Guarneri ‘Vieuxtemps’ violin sells for a record $16 million.

2018 Construction of the 280-foot-tall Mjøstårnet in Norway – currently the world’s tallest wood structure.

2022 The virtual Museum of the Wood Age opens to visitors.

1

The Museum of the Wood Age

A cultural adventure • The Wood Age • The first tools • The Clacton spear • Seahenge • Living museums • The fire drill • The virtual museum

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A cultural adventure

I have been on a journey through the veil of history, to an age when wood was the supreme material expression of human endeavour; when all people knew its properties and utility and its value in their lives. I am looking for stories and objects that trace the history of human ingenuity, of art and craft, across half a million years – along the path of a great cultural adventure that separates us from our fellow creatures. The manuscript of our evolution is bound in wood. Humans are, above all, a technological species, possessing a brain that can conceive abstract ideas and futures, and a hand with which to manipulate our environment. Wooden objects are the fossil record of human creativity, written as much in the sum of human knowledge in construction, travel, art and technology as in the discarded physical objects of the past; more so, in fact.

The soaring vault of the medieval cathedral was conceived in imitation of a forest canopy and built to last for all time. The Viking longship was crafted by people with an unsurpassed knowledge of wood’s strengths and weaknesses who trusted their lives to that knowledge. The first wheeled vehicles were assembled not by chance but in the minds of engineers who, like sculptors, imagined their revolutionary creation within the grain of a living tree. The time-worn tool handle, the stripped pine door, the soot-blackened beam of an old house, the workings of a windmill and the pearwood frame of a Renaissance masterpiece are the archive of a cumulative, creative partnership with wood. Until relatively recently, much of what humans knew about their world was first learned by exploring trees and wood for the absolute necessities of survival – explorations that paved the way for the study of materials science, geometry, chemistry, engineering and physics.

Powerful élites have always monumentalised their world, and their world view, in stone – in henges, temples, churches and mosques; in castles, bridges and roads; in pyramids, tombs and memorials to the dead. Such structures are designed to look effortless and timeless. But I reflect, walking one day beneath the oldest railway bridge in the world, which happens to stand just a few miles from where I live, that it could hardly have been constructed without many tonnes of timber cut from the ample woods cloaking the gorge that it spans. Stone buildings need scaffolding, lots of it; and stone arch bridges must also employ complex truss and brace joinery to form the semi-circular masonry spans that support their roadways as if by magic. Causey Arch was built in 1725 to cross the narrow but deeply incised River Team in County Durham. It carried coal wagons, made principally of wood and hauled by horses, along wooden rails leading down to wooden staithes on the River Tyne, from where the coal – itself a woody fossil – was shipped in wooden boats, principally to London.

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F1. A stone monument to wood: the world’s oldest railway bridge, built to carry wooden coal wagons on wooden rails.

When completed, Causey Arch was the largest single-span stone structure to have been built in Britain since the end of Roman rule in the early fifth century. A hundred years after its construction, the first public trains hauled by steam locomotives built of iron, steel and brass began to ply the new wrought-iron tracks of the Stockton to Darlington railway, no more than a day’s walk away. But that first locomotive was delivered on a horse-drawn wooden wagon.

Travelling, in the mind’s eye, to another continent, visitors to the otherworldly but very solid and imposing stone walls of the ‘great house’ at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, may reflect that although the mesas, rincons and washes of that parched landscape are now bone dry and uninhabited, a thousand years ago enterprising settlers carried 200,000 trees from the nearest forest, some 70 miles away in the Chuska Mountains, to construct the floors, roofs and wall panels of its many rooms and ceremonial structures.

The magnificent ancient mosques of West Africa, like that at Djenné in Mali, are famous for having been constructed of mud, repaired and maintained over the centuries in defiance of the wind and rain eroding their walls; but they would hardly still be standing without the reinforcing straw, natural fibre and wooden beams that support their roofs. The trees for such grandiose projects are often no longer available locally for repair work and for the construction of new mosques; but traditional techniques are still much favoured by local communities and wood is now imported from neighbouring countries.

It is hard to imagine Pueblo Bonito, Stonehenge, the pyramids, a Roman aqueduct or any medieval cathedral being put together without an immense quantity of wooden poles, beams, wedges and levers to hand. Dismantling and removing the scaffolding and forms from monumental stone structures makes the finished article look like it was built by a divine hand; and it is meant to. But the monument that survives has the effect of concealing both the timber and the sweated labour that brought it into existence. Part of the purpose of writing a book about the Wood Age is to render visible that which is invisible. Wood is the scaffolding of the human story.

Parts of my journey into the Wood Age have, of necessity, taken place remotely, or in the imagination. In 2020 the world became suddenly disconnected in a way that has not happened before in my lifetime. Landscapes, buildings and collections of material that are normally accessible were, for a while at least, off limits. By force of circumstances I have become an armchair adventurer, often following the myriad trails of the internet and of academic literature instead of nosing around quiet corners of ancient buildings, museums and workshops, as I had planned. As it happens, much of what I am looking for makes up the dark matter of the human story. These are the long-perished wooden artefacts whose existence must be inferred from archaeology or ethnography: the ghostly soil marks of long-lost buildings, the rotted handles of tools and weapons, the wrecks of ships; mere hints of apparently inconsequential devices like the bow drill, rabbit snare and digging stick.

Even when key artefacts do survive to mark a step change in the human story, they are hardly likely to tell us about the moment when an idea, device or technique was first conceived or used by some nameless genius or playful child. Nevertheless, the journey has taken me to some far-flung, exotic places as well as to much more local, seemingly familiar territory; to some of the rarest, most treasured objects in the world but also, sometimes, to the most apparently mundane. I confess that I am more inclined to spend time rummaging around half-fallen farm buildings and the sheds of allotment owners, or the bric-a-brac rooms of antique warehouses, than I am staring at a priceless treasure in a gallery display case. Even so, I am amazed by how much has survived from the ancient past to testify to the enduring relationship between wood and humans.

The Wood Age

There is, so far as I know, no museum anywhere devoted entirely to wood, that unfailingly useful and versatile material.a In collecting together the artefacts and stories in this book I have, so to speak, had to beg, borrow, steal and scavenge from the display cases and storage vaults of hundreds of museums across the world; lift and transport from their age-old foundations buildings that are still very much in use; trawl the obscure corners of scholarly research and recreate in mere words and images countless objects, techniques and connections, to evoke those places and times where the trail seems to go cold, only to be picked up somewhere else.

I therefore invite readers, wishing to share in this journey, on a self-guided tour of a virtual Museum of the Wood Age where I have assembled, curated and displayed the artefacts, and the ideas behind them, that stand as waymarkers of half a million years of cultural evolution. But first I had better explain what I mean by the Wood Age.

Museum junkies and schoolchildren alike will be aware of the so-called three ages – of Stone, Bronze and Iron – which conveniently divide prehistory into successive chronological chunks. This system was devised in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the antiquity of humanity was still a novel, even shocking, revelation. The principles of geology, laid down in the 1830s by Charles Lyell but anticipated by James Hutton at the end of the previous century,¹ established two profound insights. The first was that processes observed in the world today can be used, by analogy, to understand and reconstruct processes of rock and sediment formation deep in the past. The second was that, in stratified deposits, the oldest layers are sealed by those that lie above them. This is the principle of superposition, which underlies all archaeological ideas about stratigraphy. In the 1840s a Danish archaeologist, Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae, showed that objects found buried in the same geological or archaeological deposits – the bones of long-extinct animals and plants, and artefacts like stone axes and flint arrowheads – must have been contemporary with each other; and that distinct successive layers allowed a sequence of natural and cultural events to be reconstructed. Worsaae was the first to excavate using stratigraphic methods, peeling back one layer after another and recording the finds in each layer separately. His work proved that fellow countryman Christian Jürgensen Thomsen had been right, some twenty years earlier, to classify his museum objects into a three-age system of consecutive technologies.

That convenient scheme encapsulates a comfortable idea of technological progress from primitive (stone tools; hunting and gathering) towards sophisticated (bronze, then iron tools; agriculture, industry and urbanisation), parallels to the physiological, cultural and intellectual trajectory followed by the primate family up to its present state of brilliance. But it is no more than an expedient fiction. History and evolution do not run in straight lines; nor are those lines parallel in time or space.

Most of the prehistory galleries in thousands of national and regional museums across the world follow the conventional three-age scheme, designed to sort and classify the objects and to cement an idea of the past predicated on technological progress. Since the advent of sophisticated carbon isotope dating techniques in the 1950s those three ages have been increasingly finely tuned and subdivided: Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic (Old, Middle and New) for the Stone Age; Early Middle and Late Bronze Age; and Early, Middle and Late Iron Age.b This scheme is reinforced by the material fact that stone, bronze and iron are among the most durable materials available to us – much more so than bone, leather, textiles and wood. But even a cursory glance inside the dwelling or workshop of a farmer or craftsperson living outside the industrialised cityscapes of the First World should suffice to prove that human history was not just carved in stone or forged on an anvil, but was primarily fashioned in organic materials, often those that come from trees.

Many exhibition designers, thinking that visitors will find hand axes and bronze spear tips dull fare, are at pains to offer reconstructions – of the ‘everyday life in ancient times’ sort – by recreating that which is missing: the wax mannequin of a toiling farmer in period clothes; the ancient axe head hafted onto a modern wooden handle; the shaft that goes with the flint arrowhead; the loom (and by implication the cloth) that goes with the loom-weight. Often, experiments designed to test how such compound tools were fashioned and used have proved illuminating in their own right: experimental archaeology has made a significant contribution to understanding the past.

Sometimes archaeologists get lucky, uncovering by chance or design deposits in which organic, perishable materials have been preserved by volcanic ash, waterlogging or desiccation. From these superabundant sites, such as crannogs, shipwrecks, the tombs of pharaohs and whole towns buried by the carelessly furious eruptions of volcanoes, a richer inventory of human existence is brought to life, filling gaps where the dark matter of invisibility lurks. The shelvesful of finds and densely detailed excavation reports of such sites are mined for precious information for decades after their publication.

Ethnographers, following in the footsteps of explorers and colonists from the sixteenth century onwards, recorded many indigenous technological traditions that also shine a light on otherwise opaque processes, motivations and techniques. Often, insights have been freely and generously given by those born to such cultures. In some societies apparently unbroken traditions of primary technology seem to have been curated over thousands of years and are still practised with reverence for their forebears.c

Stone, metal and the artificial stone we call pottery are only the most manifest and tangible material remains of societies whose cultural repertoire included song and dance, story, myth and belief; language and social structure; and what anthropologists call habitus: routine ways of doing things that make one society distinct from another. Most people would call that ‘tradition’. Technology, ingenuity and craft are strong expressions of those traditions, of culture and of social interactions that include warfare, trade, alliance, subjugation, colonisation and migration. Archaeologists often describe sets of distinctive artefacts as ‘cultures’, like the ‘Beaker folk’. But it is easy to forget, in one’s enthusiasm to describe the objects we retrieve, that human life for the most part revolves around more perishable natural materials that people grow, harvest, process and use almost without thinking about them. There is an understandable tendency to see skill and design in metalwork and elaborately fashioned pots and at the same time neglect the brilliance of textiles with very high thread counts or the astonishing virtuosity of the wheelwright or cooper.

As a student of humans’ relations with their landscapes – as both an archaeologist and a woodsman – I long ago realised that wood, alongside the myriad other resources that humans derive from trees, was the fundamental natural material that empowered people to control and manipulate their world. It was available in abundance to early homininsd – who were, after all, forest dwellers – and to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, their descendants. Wood is durable, strong, bendy and easily worked by hand or with the simplest tools; it comes in all sizes and in a huge variety of species, each with its own special characteristics. Trees themselves can be propagated, harvested, transported and genetically engineered. Most woods float; some sink; some woods burn when freshly cut or ‘green’; most need seasoning. Some woods are naturally self-lubricating, perfect for the moving components in machines; some are so brittle that only a fool would think to build a house or even a chair with them. Many woods are subject to fungal or insect attack; a precious few are resistant to decay in the right conditions.

Wood burns to generate warmth in cold climates, to release valuable starches in cooked foods and to harden plastic clay into durable pottery. Wood pleases the eye when carved. In its strength and flexibility it confers on humans the mechanical advantages of the lever, the wedge, the windlass and the spring: multiplying effort, converting energy to work. Sticks are ideal for digging to find roots and for poking into holes for grubs; they can easily be worked into simple weapons for defence and attack. Wood can be hollowed out to make a container, a pipe or a floating vessel; lashed together to make a frame for a dwelling, or a raft. It is light enough to carry, yet resilient enough to withstand storm and earthquake. In the empirical, experimental discovery of its many properties through splitting, twisting and rolling, or its controlled burning to create charcoal – key to the discovery of metal alloys – lie prompts to the endless curiosity and adaptability of the human hand and brain: to explore and discover new possibilities. The hand that wields the axe is a thinking, creative hand.

The invention of complex devices – the wheeled vehicle, the sailing ship, the mill, the stringed instrument – ought to have inspired the same poetic celebration of humans’ triumph over their gods as Prometheus’s theft of the secret of fire. Strangely, versifiers of the artisan life have, by and large, overlooked the poetic potential of the sawyer, the wheelwright, the shipwright and luthier. But by the dawn of the twentieth century exponents of such age-old crafts – heroes of the Wood Age – had begun to write for themselves, albeit in prose. George Sturt, a third-generation wheelwright, remembered how:

the coming of the sawyers, towards winter time, when a roof over their heads became desirable, woke up the master wheelwright to a new interest in the timber he had bought. The proof was beginning, personal to himself. His judgement in buying those trees was put to its first test now. Its last was far ahead. Not until the seasoned timber was proven on the workman’s bench in five or six years’ time would the final verdict be given; but the first test began on the saw-pit, when the sawyers opened the yet green or sap filled tree. What did it look like? The wheelwright was most eager to know how it looked, that heart of ash or oak or elm, of so many decades standing, which no eye had ever seen before. Lovely was the first glimpse of white ash-grain, the close-knit oak, the pale brown and butter-coloured elm.²

All the ages of human life have, in truth, been one long Wood Age. Until, that is, the year 1779, fifty years or so after Causey Arch was built, when a bridge constructed using the joinery techniques and engineering eye of the carpenter and blacksmith, but entirely in cast-iron components, began to take shape across the River Severn gorge near Coalbrookdale.e With the advent of cheap, industrially produced cast and wrought iron, and with improvements in steel manufacture to create the tools, machinery, buildings, then the ships, engines and rails of a new steam-driven world, wood was displaced as the supreme material of human ingenuity. The Age of Iron lasted less than two centuries; the Age of Oil may now have reached, or passed, its peak.

When did the Wood Age begin? Certainly, the purposeful use of wood long predates the emergence of modern humans in the last quarter of a million years or so. Beavers were felling trees and birds constructing elaborate nests before the first primates started bashing each other over the head with clubs (if that is what they did). Orangutans build themselves a cosy nest of leafy branches every night. Chimpanzees don’t just pick up sticks and make use of them, but purposefully modify their tools – grass, leaves, sticks and stones – to open shells, fish honey from bees’ nests at a safe distance, crush bone to extract its marrow. So the Wood Age is, in a strict sense, much older than us. Trees and woody materials, their properties visible, tactile and very much available, as it were, ‘off the shelf’ for practical experiment, were drivers of human creativity – not just for learning how to manipulate the environment, but for the very act of learning how to learn: the supreme capability of the primate brain.

The first tools

The cognitive and mechanical skills needed to create and manipulate the flaked or chipped tools that appeared around 2 to 3 million years ago are apparent in the increased brain size and subtly altered hand anatomy of hominin species from Australopithecus onwards. Among the riverside forests and mosaic habitats of the African Rift Valley and, later, across the whole of the Old World with the widespread