For all of you into construction, what dates (approximatelY) do the following techniques come to?
-brick foundation
-poured concrete foundation
-lathe and plaster walls
-plank exterior walls
plywood exterior walls
-slate roofs
-filedstone foundations
Some geographic parameters might help. Do you mean in the States, or globally?
But anyway, as regards slate, it’s been used in Europe, particularly in Wales, since the Middle Ages. In the States, it’s also been around for a while, though I think the industry didn’t grow to appreciable size till the mid-1800s. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that slate roofing, unlike the other construction features you mention, does not necessarily indicate the age of the building. After all, an old building can have been reroofed with slate at a much later date.
As for lath & plaster, I grew up in a house in SE Michigan that was built somewhere around 1840-50. It had laths, with (sand) plaster filling/covering them. I don’t know how recent the technique was at the time the house was built, but it was built for a member of the Quirk family (ancestors of former Mich. Governor G. Mennen Williams’s wife). When I was a little girl, we met an aged woman who said she’d boarded there in the 1850s when she was a schoolteacher nearby, and that bears often came out of the woods when bacon was being cooked at breakfast time. The house was said to have been a station on the Underground Railroad a bit later, and to have housed a speakeasy in the basement during Prohibition. However, I never heard reliable witnesses attest to the UR station or to the speakeasy, so those are obviously less reliable reports.
You can find fieldstone foundations on houses in New England that were built in the early 1700s for sure, and I think probably at least as early as 1650. I would imagine it was a technique brought with them from England. Why fieldstone? New England soil was exceedingly rocky. They had to do something with all those rocks as they cleared fields to be plowed. 
Whole houses were built of fieldstone in Europe at least by 1600, and probably quite a bit earlier; I’d guess at least a millennium. Bear in mind that only in North America was building houses mainly from wood done in the past - and that only because timber was cheap to free for the cutting & shaping into what you needed. In the past, housing was always constructed from local materials, whatever was local and cheapest (mostly) or, if they were wealthy, whatever was the most durable or most ostentatious (think of today’s slate or granite countertops, then enlarge to include the whole house - except you certainly wouldn’t build the walls of slate - or the floors, without a sturdy sub-floor).
Have you tried searching on construction techniques? There is probably some sort of website owned by some association of building contractors that gives a history of construction methods. If so, it should have dates. Personally, I’d search for each of those you list one by one. That should give you lots more useful results.
As for slate roofing, it’s nearly always been a fairly expensive proposition. Quarrying, splitting into individual - shakes, I believe they’re called? I did search this; here’s an interesting article. It won’t give you history, but it will give you a clearer idea of why some people spring for it, but most builders/owners won’t do it. But from stuff I’ve picked up in reading of various kinds, I think it’s been used that way for a very long time.
In the Cleveland area, slate roofing was quite common on middle-end move-up and high-end housing in the 1920s and early 1950s. More recent houses with slate roofs are usually at the very high end of the market; you won’t see it in tract mansions, but it’s not that uncommon in the 10,000 square foot monster houses.
I was talking about the USA. In the NE area, filedstone foundations were used up to about 1870 or so, when they wer supplanted by bricks. Poured foundations seen to date from about 1920 or so…though our house (built 1923) has a fieldstone foundation. I think lathe-and plaster walls ended in the 1940’s-when sheetrock became available.
What amazes me-why our v building methods are so archaic-I though we would have gone totall prefab by now.
Related Q: Does anyone know if horsehair was used with plaster right up until drywall replaced it, or was there a period where just plaster was used without horsehair?
There was no horsehair in the plaster of the house I grew up in (see my earlier post for description).
As mentioned, slate is both ancient and current, so is not going to help much to date construction.
As for horsehair in plaster - it may have been regional as much as time. My experience:
1915, Dayton OH - horsehair
1919, San Francisco - no horsehair
Another problem - esp. in foundations (major expense) is budget - I saw a house in San Francisco I’d date to 1920’s with a single course of bricks (aka “mud wall”) while the neighbors, of course, used poured concrete.
Find the date sheetrock ™ was introduced, and you have the end of wide-spread use of wet plaster.
I don’t know what you mean by “plank” or “plywood” siding.
Hardwood (usually white oak, in my experience) over softwood 1x8 or 1x10 was standard construction (the good stuff was tounge & groove, the cheap was 1/4" thick stuff face nailed.
Steel water pipes (scraps will usually remain, even if it has been re-plumbed (too much trouble to remove)) can date.
Dunno about the beginning of plasterboard, but the church I grew up in had wet plaster walls & ceiling, with an ogee molding sculpted in, built in 1948. That was also in Michigan.
Why amazing? There are a whole lot of people & companies dependent on the way we do it now: construction industry, thousands of workers, unions, contractors, suppliers of every kind of material, teamster drivers who deliver those materials, builders of tools, government inspectors, zoners, locators, utility companies who connect to buildings, and probably a lot more I didn’t think of.
Switching would severely impact the finances of all of them, and people tend to resist things which do that. And this many people, with this much experience, can put a lot of resistance in the path of change.
But it’s changing, anyway – just slower. Most houses are built with prefab framing girders for the roof, and even some walls no come as prebilt framing sections in standard sizes. Wiring companies are selling pre-assembled cables containing phone, cable TV, internet, audio, etc. that can be run as 1 cable from each room to the junction location.
With experience living in Japan for 7 years, I’ll just note that prefab components generally look like shit and nothing looks unique. America is the country of individuality. People really dislike living in places where the buildings all look the same.
I’d personally be quite sad for the future of the US if we ever went majority prefab.
This made me chuckle. The only place I have ever seen anything approaching the utter anonymity of endless square kilometres of identical US suburban homes is on the freeway into Shangai, where there is a housing development consisting of a single US-style home photocopied all the way to the horizon.
WTF are you talking about? Have you travelled anywhere else?
Ever heard of urban sprawl, suburbia, etc.?
Ever been to Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, or France?
There are lots of prefab homes and buildings, some may have prefab components and some you may not even recognize as prefab.