WoodScope – A New Approach to the Analysis of Ancient Wooden Objects

WoodScope, with its complementary DendroScope approach, is an interdisciplinary approach for the analysis and identification of ancient wooden objects developed by Egyptologists Monika Zöller-Engelhardt and Tina Beck-Hasselbach in collaboration with wood specialists Alan Crivellaro, Flavio Ruffinatto, and Alma Piermattei. Combining expertise from Egyptology and Wood Science, the framework addresses a gap in the study of ancient Egyptian material culture: the lack of systematic, context-sensitive investigation of wood and its socio-cultural and socio-economic significance. Despite significant progress in recent years, wood remains an underexplored souce of information in Egyptology.

WoodScope establishes a fully documented and integrative workflow for wood identification and analysis that is both non-invasive or minimally invasive and applicable even in restricted research environments such as museum contexts or excavation sites. Whenever possible, the approach avoids sampling entirely; where sampling is necessary, only targeted minute fragments are used. A key feature of WoodScope is a built-in decision process that deliberately omits invasive intervention if it is unlikely to improve identification accuracy. Beyond reliable wood identification, WoodScope enables further material-based investigations, including analyses of wood deterioration, breakage, and object biographies. The analysis also contributes to Wood Science through methodological innovations, including new multi-scale identification keys. Cost-efficient, rapid, and requiring only minimal equipment, WoodScope provides immediate preliminary results while remaining transferable to archaeological contexts beyond Egyptology.

From an Egyptological perspective, WoodScope foregrounds the materiality of wooden burial assemblages to explore the relations between material, objects, functions, and actors within a coherent Material Culture Studies framework. The approach moves beyond traditional category boundaries by enabling cross-category comparison. In dialogue with praxeological approaches, WoodScope conceptualises objects as dynamic agents situated between artistic techniques and historically embedded social practices. Overall, the approach will develop an operational analytical framework capable of capturing the specificities of pre-modern material phenomena in Ancient Egyptian wooden material culture.