Ship Timber: Forests and Ships in the Iberian Peninsula during the Age of Discovery (original) (raw)

2008, in Edge of Empire: Proceedings of the Symposium held at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Eds. F. Castro and K. Custer. Casal de Cambra, Portugal: Caleidoscópio, pp. 235-248

The 15th and 16th centuries were crucial to the economic, political, and social development of the Western world, in large part due to exploration and expansion from the Iberian Peninsula. The primary vessels of this expansion were ocean going ships. Without the resources to build and maintain the naus, caravels, and other large ocean going ships the world would certainly have developed differently, perhaps drastically. The study of Iberian ship timber during this period provides an excellent first glimpse into the subject of my dissertation as this period has seen comparatively more recent scholarship than other eras. This paper is primarily an introduction to my doctoral dissertation, Ship Timber, in light of its cardinal case-study investigating how the Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, and other Iberian cultures managed, exploited, and processed perhaps the most valuable resource of the Age of Discovery: wood.

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