HYPOTHESES
The initial hypothesis posited that bricks of similar dimensions across a site are linked to simultaneous building campaigns. This would contribute to the dating of buildings across the site, as some buildings have clear documentary evidence of their construction, and others do not. If a brick patch with a known or widely accepted construction date had matching dimensions with a brick patch that did not have any associated dates, perhaps these two patches could be considered to originate from the same brick manufacturer and therefore a simultaneous construction. Later discussions proposed that bricks with similar dimensions, while potentially originating from the same manufacturer and same batch, might not be from contemporary constructions on Monroe Hill but perhaps from contemporary constructions across the entire University Grounds. After the acquisition of the Monroe Hill site and buildings by the University in the 1820s, the economical practice of recycling bricks for maintenance or new builds would have to be considered, especially on walls that do not constitute main façades.
A second hypothesis also emerged later: if industrialization standardizes brick dimensions, does standard deviation across a dataset indicate a chronology of construction? As in, are older bricks associated with a greater standard deviation, and vice versa? In the following analysis, some of the oldest accepted bricks actually had the lowest standard deviation among the samples. However, as in the previous hypothesis, brick recycling remains a variable that cannot be accounted for in the undertaken methods of statistical analysis.
