Old versus new - timber analysis of Acre and Haifa in nineteenth-century Palestine

In our earlier work, timber identification of eighteenth and nineteenth-century buildings was analyzed in various places throughout Palestine: in cities like Jerusalem and Jaffa as well as in traditional villages and agricultural settlements. Distinct differences were found between the timber used in the traditional built-up areas of the old cities, and the timber used in the suburbs and settlements built by new immigrants, both Jewish and Christians, arriving in Palestine from 1850s onwards. The aim of this paper is to present the botantial identification of the construction timber in two other cities in Palestine, Haifa and Acre. Situated 10 kilometers apart, both cities served as main ports of northern Palestine. We hypothesize that differences in wood species used as construction timber might point to different historio-geographical development of these two cities.