The interpretation of shipwrecks can be a complicated matter and is often performed by specialists within the discipline (sometimes called ‘nautical archaeologists’). However, even these specialists can use all the help they can get. Who better to assist and teach them than the boat builders that are still building wooden boats today?

A couple of weeks ago, the 8^th annual ‘Faro Rhino Archaeological User Group’ or FRAUG conference took place in Baltimore, Ireland. This year’s organiser, Pat Tanner, a traditional boat builder, 3D scanning expert and PhD researcher at the University of Southampton took it on himself to organise a week of boat building at Hegarty’s traditional boatyard.

For an entire week, a group of maritime archaeologists from a variety of countries thought about how design could have been translated into wood. To kick things off and get into the right state of mind, Juan Pablo Olaberria and Thomas Dhoop of the University of Southampton gave a presentation on the design and construction of Viking Age ships.

The next few days, it was time to put what we as experts write about into practice. Could we actually build a boat? At Hegarty’s shipyard, six keels with stem and stern were ready-made for us. The challenge was to construct a clinker-built boat of about 3,5m (12 feet) long and 1,2m (ca. 4 feet) wide. Two of the boats were to be built with U-shaped moulds, the remaining three without. The moulds are used to bend the planks to shape. This helps to control the final shape of the boat. Several traditional boat builders were on hand to offer (a minimum of) advice and guidance. By Thursday, much to the archaeologist’s and boat builders’ surprise, using a variety of different methods and techniques, every team had built a ‘boat’.

The shapes of the boats differed radically and was largely determined by the techniques that the teams decided to use. One of the teams did not use a mould and decided to use the raw material, 20cm (8 inch) wide planks in their entirety. The boat therefore took the shape that the pliability of the planks would allow it to take, something which resembled a canoe. Another team did use a mould and reduced the planks to half of their original width. This allowed them to put a lot more curvature into the planks while bending them against the mould which consequently resulted in a more flat-bottomed boat.

Engaging with boat building and traditional boat builders in this manner provided valuable insights for us maritime archaeologists. Every tool leaves a certain mark on planks and other parts of a boat. When recorded and interpreted properly, these markings can tell us if a plank was sewn or cleaved, fastened to another plank or a frame, if treenails or nails were used, and so on. Sometimes, the shipwright will even leave instructions for an apprentice such as the places where a hole should be drilled or where the overlap between planks should end. Recognising these tool-marks is an important part of the interpretation of ancient boats. Physically wielding the tools that leave these markings and producing them ourselves while building the boats turned out to be by far the best way to learn how to ‘read’ the marks that the ancient boat builders left for us.

With their wealth of practical experience, boat builders can often advise archaeologists on how to interpret certain tool-marks and can provide valuable insights in how a boat might have been  conceived and constructed. However, as archaeologists we should also be aware of the fact that every craftsman will speak from the biased perspective of his own ‘tradition’. A wooden boat builder in Baltimore, Ireland will use a different set of techniques and will construct differently shaped boats than a wooden boat builder in western Norway. This is because, over generations of knowledge being passed down from master to apprentice, boat builders in different places have developed different habits. They developed different ways of doing things which they all consider to be ‘the right way’. We have to keep in mind that, the solutions modern wooden boat builders come up with to solve certain practical problems might not be the same as boat builders in the past would have.

Thomas Dhoop

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CMA masters students spent most of the long bank holiday weekend at Buckler’s Hard in the New Forest learning ancient boat and ship building skills.

The backdrop of the River Beaulieu, the intermittent sunshine and occasional ice cream belie the serious labour (both physical and intellectual) involved in learning to work with adzes and axes. Using a range of replica tools students worked with chunks of oak to recreate boat building technologies from the Bronze Age to the Post Medieval period.

This kind of experimental archaeology offers a unique pedagogical experience. It allows students to engage with the physical labour and bodily practices involved in boat building, as well as the tools, techniques and environment. They experience at first hand the time, co-operation and materials involved and the types of choices engaged in choosing timber and in moving and shaping those timbers collaboratively. Hopefully, they also gain an inkling of the embodied skills and knowledge involved in working with the tools and the wood. When it’s going well an axe moves as an extension of the body, connecting head, hand and timber, and producing a beautiful hollow, rhythmical sound – but it takes a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge to see boat frames in tree trunks, work with and accommodate knots and imperfections, and to sculpt parts of a boat out of massive pieces of oak.

Shaping timbers with an adze

For researchers this kind of experimental archaeology remains a valuable tool in efforts to better understand seafaring and maritime communities in the past. In replicating something of the experience of ancient boat building, it can open up our ideas about the connections between timber, tools, labour and the social world within which that building took place, as well as offering a unique opportunity to test out our ideas about how ancient boats were constructed, crewed and used. The recent Bronze Age Dover Boat reconstruction is a prime example of this kind of work.

This weekend’s course was also an opportunity for Jon Adams to do some filming for the maritime archaeology MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) we are developing at the CMA. There will be more news on that in the next few months, with – we hope – the first course going live in the autumn.

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