Chemin de la Mâture, Cont.

Considering it’s historical importance, it is astonishing that the Great Mast Crisis is not better known. All school children are taught about the Boston Tea Party, even in Britain; none are taught about the Pine Tree Riot. This is not an isolated instance; accounts of human evolution, prehistory, and history routinely ignore the role played by wood. For instance, anthropologists wax lyrical about the developments of stone tools, and the intellectual and motor skills needed to shape them, while brushing aside the importance of digging sticks, spears, and bows and arrows with which early humans actually obtained their food. Archaeologists downplay the role wood fires played in enabling modern humans to cook their food and smelt metals. Technologists ignore the way in which new metal tools facilitated better woodworking to develop the groundbreaking new technologies of wheels and plank ships. And architectural historians ignore the crucial role of wood in roofing medieval cathedrals, insulating country houses, and underpinning whole cities.

When I stumbled across the Chemin de la Mâture 35 years ago, I too was largely ignorant of the importance of wood. I knew about its anatomy, it’s mechanical properties, and some of its structural uses. However, only when I turned to research the mechanics of root anchorage in plants and landed a permanent post in academia did I start to learn more about wood. One of the great benefits of being an academic (or used to be) is that it gives you the opportunity to find out about a wide variety of topics, through your own research and teaching, and through discussions with your colleagues in (now sadly defunct) tearooms. In my case, I started to find out more about biomechanics by supervising a wide range of student projects. I set bright young students to study subjects such as the mechanical design of our own bodies, the mechanics of wood and trees, and latterly the benefits of urban forests. I wrote a book about trees and started to learn more about the uses of wood and the relationship between human beings and trees. My teaching also led me to think more about the relationship that our relatives the apes have with trees, and to learn about exciting new research that was uncovering the ways in which apes make and use a variety of wooden tools. I was lucky enough to become involved with researchers who studied how apes move through the canopy and build wooden nests. And I started to think about how early humans could have made effective woodworking tools and shaped their spears and ax handles.

All these discoveries tied in with my happy memories of visits I had made from childhood onward to a wide range of wood-related attractions: local archaeological museums with their rows of ax heads and reconstructions of the life of “early man”; Scandinavian open air museums, filled with wooden farm houses, water mills, windmills, and stave churches; Viking longboats; the roofs of Gothic churches and cathedrals, medieval barns and castles; and Palladian country houses. It became clear to me that wood has actually played a central role in our history. It is the one material that has provided continuity in our long evolutionary and cultural story, from apes moving about the forest, through spear-throwing hunter-gatherers and ax-wielding farmers to roof-building carpenters and paper-reading scholars. And knowing something about the properties of wood and the growth of trees, I started to work out why this was the case. The foundations of our relationship with wood lie in its remarkable properties. As an all-around structural material it is unmatched. It is lighter than water, yet weight for weight is as stiff, strong, and tough as steel and can resist both being stretched and compressed. It is easy to shape, as it readily splits along the grain, and is soft enough to carve, especially when green. It can be found in pieces large enough to hold up houses, yet can be cut up into tools as small as a toothpick. It can last for centuries if it is kept permanently dry or wet, yet it can also be burned to keep us warm, to cook our food, and drive a wide range of industrial processes. With all these advantages, the central role of wood in the human story was not just explicable, but inevitable.

So it is time to reassess the role of wood. This book is a new interpretation of our evolution, prehistory, and history, based on our relationship with this most versatile material. I hope to show that looking at the world in this fresh wood-centered way, what an academic might call lignocentric, can help us make far more sense of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.

Above all I hope to encourage the reader to look at the world in a way that is unhindered by the conventional wisdom that the story of humanity is defined by our relationship with three materials: stone, bronze, and iron. It refutes the common assumption that wood is little more than an obsolete relic from our distant past. I hope it will show that for the vast majority of our time on this planet we have lived in an age dominated by this most versatile material, and that in many ways we still do. And that for the benefit of the environment and our own physical and psychological health, we need to return to the Age of Wood.

The Age of Wood, by Roland Ennos