Reading the age of salvage

Fabric first

What the object is made of narrows the period faster than what it looks like. Wrought iron, soft-fired brick, old-growth heartwood and hand-blown glass all have working lives that ended at reasonably well-known points, and none of them can be convincingly faked in bulk. Establish the material before you look at the ornament, because ornament was copied continuously and is still being copied now.

Then the fastening

How a thing is held together changes more reliably than how it is shaped. Pegged through-tenons, cut nails with rectangular sections, forged collars and threaded shanks each belong to a different moment from dowels, wire nails, welds and cast-in bosses. Fastenings are also the part nobody bothers to fake, because they are usually hidden.

Then the tooling

Look for the marks of the process. Hand-worked mouldings vary along their length and machine-run mouldings do not. Sash-saw marks run straight across a board and circular-saw marks arc. A mould seam, a parting line or a drag mark from a wooden brick mould each identify how the object was made, which is a much narrower question than when it was fashionable.

Wear last

Wear should agree with the object's supposed use. A door knob should be worn where a palm sits, a stair tread in the middle rather than at the ends, a sink at the point where things were dragged out of it. Wear in the wrong place, or wear that is even all over, is the strongest single signal that a piece has been distressed rather than used.