Tag Archives: archaeological computing

Prior to the creation of an English tree-ring chronology in the late 1980s, typology was the main method by which to date a timber structure. Cecil Alec Hewett (1926-1998) pioneered buildings typologies for medieval carpentry joints and timber-framed buildings in south-eastern England (Gibson and Andrews 1998, online). In Hewett’s seminal work English Historic Carpentry the inner sleeve reads “he [Hewett] has shown that the methods of assembling timber buildings, particularly the joints used, follow a strict historical sequence, as datable as ceramics” (Hewett 1980a, inner sleeve). In the case of Hewett, typology is defined as being “historically diagnostic because they are historically unique, that is, they are ‘peculiar to a given time and place’” (Sackett 1977, 371) and therefore, progress from the archaic to the mechanically advanced in a datable sequence of ‘style and function’ (Ibid.). Continue reading →

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