Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Wood Profiling

Wood Profiling: Examinations of Wood in the Context of Artefact Analyses

Digital Lunch Seminar Series 2023/2024, Lecture 1/4

Speakers: Professor Dr Jörg Fromm und Dr Marina Creydt

Chair: Malgorzata Grzelec

The first half of the presentation provides a brief overview on wood. No other plant-based substance has had such a strong influence on the history of mankind as wood. With today’s ever growing economic and environmental problems, wood as a raw material takes on increasing significance as the most important renewable source of energy and as construction material. Its chemical and anatomical structure and the resulting excellent properties allow wood to be processed into the most widely differing products; from logs to veneers and furniture and from wood chippings to pulp, paper and wood-based panels. Products such as viscose fibres and cellulose nitrate laquer can be obtained from cellulose derived from wood.

In the subsequent part of the lecture, procedures for the chemical analysis of wood are presented. The focus is on determining the geographical origin of wood using mass spectrometric analyses and evaluating the data by means of chemometric methods.