FRAUG 2014, Starting the Dialogue between Archaeologist and Boat Builder
Last week, I travelled to the lovely little town of Baltimore, Ireland for the 8th annual FRAUG 
conference. This year’s gathering was organised by Pat Tanner, a traditional boat builder, 3D scanning expert and PhD candidate at the University of Southampton who called in a lot of favours to offer us a week of boat building at Haggerty’s traditional boatyard.
The ‘Faro Rhino Archaeological User Group‘ or FRAUG started out as an informal gathering of maritime archaeologists experimenting and sharing experiences in using the Faro-arm and Rhinoceros-software to record boats, ships and wrecks. As the projects progressed, so did the conference and although it still has a strong methodological component and serves as a platform to discuss new and innovative ways to record shipwrecks, this year’s focus lay primarily on the interpretation of ships and boats in the archaeological record.
On the Sunday evening before the boat building activities commenced, Pat invited Juan Pablo Olaberria and myself to give a presentation on our ideas concerning ‘mental templates in Viking Age shipbuilding’ which again stirred a nice discussion on how design could have been translated into wood in the Viking Age. We were pleased to hear that Fred Hocker, director of research at the Vasa Museum, had taken an interest in our work and throughout the week we had the opportunity to pick his brain which resulted in some very valuable comments and contributions to our paper.
The next few days, it was time to put what we all write about into practice. Could we 
actually build a boat? At Haggerty’s shipyard, six keels with stem and stern were prepared for us. The challenge was to construct a clinker-built boat of about 12 feet (+/- 3,5m) long and 4 feet (+/- 1,2m) wide. Two of the boats were to be build with moulds, the remaining three without. Several traditional boat builders were on hand to offer (a minimum of) advice and guidance. By Thursday, much to our own and the boat builder’s surprise, using a variety of different methods, every team had built a ‘boat’.
Our team, consisting out of Sarah Stark, Micheal Cepak, Rodrigo Ortiz, Dr. John Cooper, Juan Pablo Olaberria and myself came up with a very simple method of construction and design. We did not use a mould and did not put much thought in the final shape of our 
vessel, it therefore took the shape that the pliability of the +/-8 inch (20,3cm) planks would allow it to take, something which resembled a canoe. However, the choice not to shape our planks or even reduce them in width did have the advantage that the progress on ‘uncompromising quality’ was quick, which gave us the time to caulk the weak spots, a definite advantage during the launch of the boats.
Overall, building a boat, comparing our approach and result with the other groups and the discussions with the traditional boat builders proved to be very instructive and an invaluable experience for my research. This entire process was also recorded by Dr. Lucy Blue of the University of Southampton to investigate the advantages of having a more intense dialogue between maritime archaeologists and traditional boat builders.
On the final day, presentations were given by all involved projects and it was decided the next meeting will be held in Lelystad, the Netherlands and will focus on sailing. Thank you for this wonderful experience Pat! I can hardly wait to see what next year’s FRAUG will bring.
