A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

from the Ems basin between the modern Netherlands and western Germany ( Lower Saxony or North Rhine-Westphalia). Finally, the data obtained for the small group which includes four other Neeroeteren apostles and the Siersdorf St John the Baptist are less explicit, but the wood seems also to have been procured from further afield, likely somewhat upriver on the Meuse to the south (modern Belgium) or from North Rhine-Westphalia to the north. This study contributes to a better understanding of the context of produc- tion of these sculptures, their dating, the selection of the raw material and the oak-supplying networks active in the region in which they were produced. The information acquired, which is of different kinds and different degrees of precision, would be useful for further studies in dendrochronology and other fields of research such as art history, forest history, technical studies and so on. Thus it is greatly to be hoped that such study will be continued, as more than one hundred sculptures from the Elsloo group preserved abroad are still wait- ing to be analysed by dendrochronology! Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Belgian owners who kindly allowed me to study the objects in their collections. I also address a particular thank you to the curators of the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht and the St John the Baptist Church in Siersdorf, who made it possible for our Belgian institute to study their ‘ Elsloo sculptures’. I would like to warmly thank the colleagues from different European dendrochronological laboratories for their generous help in this ­ project, in particular for the dendro-provenance research. I thank Sjoerd van Daalen (BAAC bv), Marta Domínguez Delmás (Stichting RING, Amersfoort), Thomas Frank (Labor für Dendroarchäologie, Cologne), Kristof Haneca (Onroerend Erfgoed, Brussels), Patrick Hoffsummer (Université de Liège – Centre Européen d’Archéométrie), Sebastian Luke (Pressler GmbH, Gersten) and Willy Tegel (DendroNet, Bohlingen), who shared their data with me, with a special thank you to Aoife Daly (Dendro.dk, Brønshøj) who helped me in producing the maps. I am very grateful to my colleague and friend Ian Tyers (Dendrochronological Consultancy Ltd, Sheffield) for participating in the conference despite his full schedule, and most of all, for his presentation which introduced my own study. Many thanks also go to Lisa Shindo, Armelle Weitz and Sarah Crémer (KIK-IRPA) who supported me daily during this fascinating project. Finally, I thank Rebecca Miller who translated the text of the oral presentation preceding this article and Lee Preedy who meticulously revised the translation of this paper.