Wood fuel consumption in the city of Barcelona in the medieval and early modern periods. An overview based on archaeological wood charcoal analysis

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-024-01030-7 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Wood fuel consumption in the city of Barcelona in the medieval and early modern periods. An overview based on archaeological wood charcoal analysis Sabrina Bianco1,2,3 · Philip Banks4 · Ethel Allué1,3 Santiago Riera Mora2 · Llorenç Picornell‑Gelabert5 · Carme Miró Alaix2 · Received: 19 August 2024 / Accepted: 19 November 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Wood fuel was essential for urban development in the Mediterranean area during the Middle Ages. Therefore, wood gathering practices and supply can be investigated through the study of wood-charcoal fragments obtained from urban archaeological contexts. This paper considers anthracological remains from 14 archaeological rescue-interventions in Barcelona (NE Iberia), to reconstruct the city’s wood-fuel usage from the 6th to the 17th century ce. The diachronic anthracological sequence, compared with a previous study of the Roman period, reveals significant changes in the city's energy supply and woodland impact over time. Between the 6th and 13th centuries ce, there was a reduction in Quercus ilex (holm oak) wood exploitation and an increase in the use of shrubby vegetation, due to oak woodland degradation, partly caused by agriculture and grazing expansion. The growing use of vine, olive and other fruit tree prunings during the Middle Ages indicates the spread of arboriculture in the Barcelona plain. Furthermore, despite local oak woodland regression, evergreen and deciduous oak wood usage increased from the 14th century onwards, due to fuel imports to meet the growing urban energy demands. Differences in fuel consumption among the city’s socio-economic sectors are discussed, revealing discrepancy between urban fuel and that used outside the city walls on the shore. Finally the fuel used in some urban productive activities is also examined, highlighting a heterogeneous range of solutions, based on local availability and convenience. Overall, this research provides the first extensive diachronic analysis of fuel consumption in a Mediterranean city, illustrating the importance of archaeobotany for understanding pre-industrial urban resource management. Keywords Urban fuel provision · Barcelona · Anthracology · Middle Ages · Early modern period · Woodland dynamics Introduction Communicated by F. Antolín. * Sabrina Bianco 1 Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA), Tarragona, Spain 2 Seminari d’Estudis i Recerques Prehistòriques (SERP), Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Barcelona, Spain 3 Departament d’Història i Història de l’Art, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain 4 Independent Researcher (Medieval Urban History), Barcelona, Spain 5 ArqueoUIB Research Group, Departament de Ciències Històriques i Teoria de les Arts, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain In the western Mediterranean, the Middle Ages are marked by conflicts of power, changes in land exploitation and demographic growth. These dynamics brought about significant institutional and economic transformations, fostering among other changes, the expansion and consolidation of urban realities (Bonnassie 1988; Bensch 1995; Salrach 1997; Feliu 2010, 2012). In this line, the development and demographic stability of cities are also deeply dependent on their energy management, such as the supply of wood fuel (Cipolla 1962; Malanima 2014). Urban anthracology, i.e. the analysis of wood charcoal fragments mostly derived from fuel debris in urban archaeological contexts, represents a fundamental step towards the understanding of past vegetation dynamics and woodland exploitation related to fuel obtainment, shedding light on Vol.:(0123456789) Vegetation History and Archaeobotany wood catchment areas and, more widely, for assessing the territorial and environmental impacts of cities (Chabal 1992; Chabal et al. 1999; Deforce 2017; Kabukcu 2018; Dussol et al. 2021). The city of Barcelona (Catalonia, North-East Iberian Peninsula) has a rich historical literature dedicated to exploring the rise and early structuring of urban society, as well as its fiscal, economic and commercial evolution, due to its wealth of preserved written documentation (Carrère 1977; Batlle i Gallart 1979; Ruiz-Domènec 1980; Banks 1992, 2003; Guàrdia i Bassols and Garcia Espuche 1992a, b; Bensch 1995; Garcia Espuche 1998, 2009; Orti i Gost 2000; Riera Melis 2015). The supply of raw resources has also been approached from the written fiscal sources (Salicrú i Lluch 1995; Càceres Nevot 1999; Sales i Favà 2024; Soberón in press, among others). However, urban fuel procurement and its environmental consequences during the medieval and modern periods have hardly been investigated starting from the material records, using the anthracological approach, in the framework of a generalised lack of archaeobotanical studies covering historical periods in urban contexts in the Mediterranean area. Over the past few decades, palynological studies conducted in various areas of the Barcelona plain, largely due to the work of S. Riera Mora, provide an insight into the vegetation dynamics (Riera Mora 1994). However, few pollen sequences extend to the more recent periods, such as the medieval and the early modern eras, partly due to the difficulty of locating undisturbed sediments from these phases in the plain. Furthermore, the chronological resolution in most cases has been low. In the southern part of the plain, the Murtrassa pollen sequence (Fig. 1a) spans from the 8th to the 16th century ce, but contains only one radiocarbon (14C) date. The sequence from Can Clot (Fig. 1b) has been dated to Late Antiquity based on ceramic material analysis. In the northern part of the plain, the Besòs pollen sequence (Fig. 1d) covers the period from the Early Neolithic (6,870 14 bp) to medieval times, with only two C-dates (7th century ce) available for the entire historical phase (Riera Mora 1994; Riera Mora and Esteban-Amat 1994). Finally, a pollen sequence from Pla de Palau (Fig. 1c), located near the city, offers a more precise chronological resolution between the 9th and the 15th century ce, though the later part of the sequence is affected by sediments containing urban sewage waste (Julià Brugués and Riera i Mora 2010). Overall, these sequences reveal significant deforestation and an increase in fire activity in the plain starting from the Early Middle Ages, leading to the expansion of shrubland and secondary vegetation. However, the dynamics vary across different areas, with vegetation recovery being more challenging in the south of the plain compared to the north, where Quercus ilex (holm oak) woodlands showed more resilience (Riera Mora 1994; Julià Brugués and Riera i Mora 2010). More widely, medieval deforestation dynamics have also been identified through palynology in other areas of Catalonia, such as in Al (...truncated)