Building stone use through time in Cambridge is reassessed based on a new field survey of most significant buildings within the city boundary. Included in the survey is stone external to buildings, as walling or dressings, but omitting paving and most roofing. Stone provenance is identified to a quarry or quarry group where possible. Stone location is specified by grid reference and as a named component of each building. The date of each building project is extracted from documentary evidence if available. The volume of stone used in each project is estimated from whether it forms walls or dressings or both, and over what proportion of the host building. Assigning stone types to a single quarry, mostly in a laterally and vertically heterogeneous shallow-marine Jurassic carbonate sequence, involves the use of ‘type locations’—buildings with documented evidence of stone source and construction date. Field-scale identification criteria are essential to complement museum reference samples and microscopic petrography. The new database of stone and brick includes over 1300 records, about three times more than compiled from previous studies. This semi-quantitative approach to stone use yields pie charts of relative volumes of stone types, scatter plots of first use of each quarry’s stone against its distance from Cambridge, and histograms of the volume of each stone type through time. These results inform discussion of geological, locational, and societal influences on the sequence of stone use. The methodology used in the Cambridge study should prove useful in other heritage towns and cities.

根据对城市边界内最重要建筑物的新现场调查，重新评估了剑桥的建筑石材使用时间。调查中包括建筑物外部的石材，例如墙面或敷料，但省略了铺路和大部分屋顶。在可能的情况下，向采石场或采石场组识别石材出处。石材的位置由网格参考指定，并作为每个建筑物的命名组件。每个建筑项目的日期均从书面证据中提取（如果有）。每个项目中使用的石材量是根据其是否形成墙体或装饰物或两者兼有，以及占主体建筑的比例来估算的。将石材类型分配给单个采石场，主要是沿横向和纵向非均质的浅海侏罗纪碳酸盐岩层序，涉及“类型位置”的使用-具有书面记录的石材来源和建造日期的证据的建筑物。田间规模的鉴定标准对于补充博物馆参考样品和显微岩相学至关重要。新的石头和砖块数据库包含1300多个记录，大约是以前研究的三倍。这种半定量的石材使用方法可以得出相对于石材类型相对体积的饼图，每个采石场首次使用石材相对于距剑桥的距离的散布图，以及每种石材随时间变化的体积直方图。这些结果有助于讨论对石材使用顺序的地质，位置和社会影响。剑桥研究中使用的方法论应在其他历史悠久的城镇中被证明是有用的。