Effects of social and climatic factors on building activity in the Czech lands between 1450 and 1950: a dendrochronological analysis

Abstract

The development of settlement and building activity is the result of socioeconomic, political and demographic changes in the past. However, accurate information on temporal variation in building activity is rather limited. Dendrochronological databases containing dated historical wooden constructions provide an important resource. We used 6514 tree-felling dates to reconstruct building activity in the Czech lands for the period 1450-1950. Comparing felling dates with historical events demonstrated that building activity was negatively associated with intense wars, particularly during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). After the Peace of Westphalia (1648), socioeconomic renewal and demographic growth were reflected in an upsurge of building activity, especially ecclesiastical buildings. While the construction of ecclesiastical and noble buildings culminated around the 1720s, rural buildings peaked in the 1780s and the 1820s. Although no direct effect of climate was demonstrated, adverse climatic conditions leading to harvest failures and subsequent famines (e.g. the 'Hunger Years' 1770-1772) significantly contributed to declines in building activity. In contrast, a higher number of felling dates were detected when strong and/or frequent windstorms occurred. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of building activity in Central Europe and advocates the use of dendrochronological databases for the investigation of human activities in history.

Regional Patterns of Late Medieval and Early Modern European Building Activity Revealed by Felling Dates

“…The most important difference is arguably a more stepwise, and slightly later, recovery in building activity following the Late Medieval Crisis. Another noteworthy feature is an earlier onset of the "Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" (Hobsbawm, 1954;Parker, 2013), also evident in the recent felling-date-based study for Czechia by Kolář et al (2022).…”

“…Felling dates could be compared with grain prices on regional scales where the grain prices are identified through hierarchical cluster analysis to strongly co-vary. Future studies could strive to compare the association between the number of felling dates and plague outbreaks on local to regional scales [as done for Ireland by Mallory and Baillie (1988) and Baillie (2006), and for Czechia by Kolář et al (2022)]. Ljungqvist et al (2018) found that the number of plague outbreaks, at an aggregated scale, showed an even stronger association with the number of felling dates than grain prices.…”

“…Extant plague datasets contain too many geographical biases, for most parts of Europe, to allow for meaningful regional studies of plague-building activity associations (e.g., Roosen and Curtis, 2018). Furthermore, comparing the number of felling dates with the number of major armed conflicts, or their intensity, on local to regional scales would be of interest, for example for Czechia (Kolář et al, 2022). This would be challenging as the quantification of the number of armed conflicts is prone to bias (see van Bavel et al, 2019;Ljungqvist et al, 2021) and available war datasets do not properly capture the societal costs of the conflicts of interest.…”

Weather and climate and their human impacts and responses during the Thirty Years' War in central Europe

“…In the Czech Lands, depopulation is estimated to have been around 30 %, although the accuracy of this figure is questionable due to unreliable population estimates before the TYW (Maur, 1987;Fialová et al, 1996). However, a significant decrease in population is evident in the region through a substantial decline in building activity, which dropped by more than 30 % during the TYW compared to the previous 30 years (Kolář et al, 2022).…”

New perspectives on historical climatology

“…Further issues arise in the integration of historical climatology and paleoclimatology: that is, reconstructions based on archives of societies and those based on archives of nature. High‐resolution paleoclimate proxies such as tree‐ring width and density promise valuable insights into climate variability and impacts on human historical scales, independently or alongside information from written records and artifacts (e.g., Kolář et al, 2022; Ljungqvist et al, 2019). Recent studies have engaged in systematic comparisons of historical records with tree ring‐based reconstructions to identify strengths, weaknesses, and patterns in results.…”