Bronze Age boat reconstruction is altering archaeologists' view of era
thisiscornwall.co.uk | 5-25-2013 | Simon Parker
They were not clad in skins and they did not have to paddle for six hours at a stretch, but the experience of taking a replica Bronze Age boat out to sea was enough to convince archaeologists and boatbuilders of the value of their work.
"Until you build a boat like this, you cannot know the difficulties people in prehistory overcame," said lead archaeologist Robert Van de Noort. "And until you take a vessel out on the water you cannot see how efficient they were."
Professor Van de Noort, along with shipwright Brian Cumby, was the driving force behind a project to build the first full-size replica of a boat used around our shores 4,000 years ago. Hewn from solid oak at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth and launched in March, the volunteers who undertook the labour, along with several archaeologists, put the boat through its paces this week.
Using specially crafted paddles, 19 men and women were guided in the fine art of powering seven tons of wood through the water. The short voyage was hailed a triumph of collaboration between academic and artisan.
Remarkably stable and relatively quick for its size, the crew was soon able to manoeuvre around buoys and other vessels with ease. Professor Van de Noort, who is based at the University of Exeter, said he was delighted with the results, adding that the project had proved the enormous value of experimental archaeology.
"She moves well in the water – perhaps better than I'd expected," he said. "I could turn her quite easily with the rudder paddle. One thing we've learned already is that because she sits very high in the water, it is likely she can probably carry a much greater load than we first thought.
"Because she is flat-bottomed and has no keel the wind does tend to push her away. But with a few tons of ballast – perhaps tin ingots – she might handle better."
Professor Van de Noort explained that his interest in Bronze Age mariners went back many years. He said the project team consulted drawings made in the 1930s by Ted Wright, who discovered what became known as the Ferriby boats on the Humber.
"I have studied this sort of boat for many years and have written a lot about what they did and what they meant," he said. "But after a while I began to think it was all a bit silly because everything we write is only hypothesis. It was then I decided we should a have a go at building one. Fortunately Brian is a brilliant shipwright and was keen to take it on."
Named Morgawr, after the mythical sea serpent of Falmouth Bay, the boat took a team of 50 volunteers 11 months to construct. A first for "experimental archaeology" and a first for the NMMC, it was built as part of a collaborative project with the University of Exeter. The bulk of the hull was cut, using bronze adzes, from two huge oak trunks. Once shaped, they were "sewn together" using yew withies and sealed with moss and tallow.
"This is experimental archaeology at its best," said archaeologist and NMMC assistant curator Jenny Wittamore. A former student of Prof Van de Noort, she added: "A lot of people have preconceived ideas of what life was like in prehistory and there is an assumption that technology was very limited. So they were surprised to realise technology several thousand years ago was so complex.
"For me it is wonderful to change people's perspectives about what life was like in prehistory."
There are now plans to conduct further experiments to help build a clearer picture of Bronze Age travel and transportation. Screenings of a film by award-winning Cornish cinematographer Mark Jenkin, charting the boat's journey from log to launch, are being arranged for later this year.
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Bronze-Age Boats
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uniface
Bronze-Age Boats
Last edited by uniface on Tue Jun 04, 2013 4:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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uniface
Re: New Bronze-Age Boat Built
Archaeologists excited by discovery of eight ‘startlingly well-preserved’ Bronze Age boats.
A fleet of eight prehistoric boats, including one almost nine metres long, has been discovered in a Cambridgeshire quarry on the outskirts of Peterborough.
The vessels, all deliberately sunk more than 3,000 years ago, are the largest group of bronze age boats ever found in the same UK site and most are startlingly well preserved. One is covered inside and out with decorative carving described by conservator Ian Panter as looking “as if they’d been playing noughts and crosses all over it”. Another has handles carved from the oak tree trunk for lifting it out of the water. One still floated after 3,000 years and one has traces of fires lit on the wide flat deck on which the catch was evidently cooked.
Several had ancient repairs, including clay patches and an extra section shaped and pinned in where a branch was cut away. They were preserved by the waterlogged silt in the bed of a long-dried-up creek, a tributary of the river Nene, which buried them deep below the ground.
“There was huge excitement over the first boat, and then they were phoning the office saying they’d found another, and another, and another, until finally we were thinking, ‘Come on now, you’re just being greedy,’” Panter said.
The boats were deliberately sunk into the creek, as several still had slots for transoms – boards closing the stern of the boat – which had been removed.
Archaeologists are struggling to understand the significance of the find. Whatever the custom meant to the bronze age fishermen and hunters who lived in the nearby settlement, it continued for centuries. The team from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit is still waiting for the results of carbon 14 dating tests, but believes the oldest boats date from around 1,600 BC and the most recent 600 years later.
They already knew the creek had great significance – probably as a rich source of fish and eels – as in previous seasons at the Much Farm site they had found ritual deposits of metalwork, including spears.
The boats themselves may have been ritual offerings, or may have been sunk for more pragmatic reasons, to keep the timber waterlogged and prevent it from drying out and splitting when not in use – but in that case it seems strange that such precious objects were never retrieved.
Some of the boats were made from huge timbers, including one from an oak which must have had a metre-thick trunk and stood up to 20 metres tall. This would have been a rare specimen as sea levels rose and the terrain became more waterlogged, creating the Fenland landscape of marshes, creeks and islands of gravel.
“Either this was the Bermuda Triangle for bronze age boats, or there is something going on here that we don’t yet understand,” Panter said.
Kerry Murrell, the site director, said: “Some show signs of long use and repair – but others are in such good condition they look as if you could just drop the transom board back in and paddle away.”
The boats were all nicknamed by the team, including Debbie – made of lime wood, and therefore deemed a blonde – and French Albert the Fifth Musketeer, the fifth boat found. Murrell’s favourite is Vivienne, a superb piece of craftsmanship where the solid oak was planed down with bronze tools to the thickness of a finger, still so light and buoyant that when their trench filled with rainwater, they floated it into its cradle for lifting and transportation.
Because the boats were in such striking condition, they have been lifted intact and transported two miles, in cradles of scaffolding poles and planks, for conservation work at the Flag Fen archaeology site – where a famous timber causeway contemporary with the boats was built up over centuries until it stretched foralmost a mile across the fens.
“My first thought was to deal with them in the usual way, by chopping them into more manageably sized chunks, but when I actually saw them they just looked so nice, I thought we had to find another way,” Panter, an expert on waterlogged timber from York Archaeological Trust, said. “I think if I’d arrived on the site with a chainsaw, the team would have strung me up.”
Must Farm, now a quarry owned by Hanson UK, which has funded the excavation, has already yielded a wealth of evidence of prehistoric life, including a settlement built on a platform partly supported by stilts in the water, where artefacts including fabrics woven from wool, flax and nettles were found. Instead of living as dry-land hunters and farmers, the people had become experts at fishing: one eel trap found near the boats is identical to those still used by Peter Carter, the last traditional eel fisherman in the region.
The boats will be on display from Wednesday at Flag Fen, viewed through windows in a container chilled to below 5c – funded with a £100,000 grant from English Heritage which regards their discovery as of outstanding importance – built within a barn at the site. At the moment conservation technician Emma Turvey, dressed in layers of winter clothes, is spending up to eight hours a day spraying the timbers to keep them waterlogged and remove any potentially decaying impurities. They will then be impregnated with a synthetic wax, polyethylene glycol, before being gradually dried out over the next two years for permanent display.
Murrell is convinced there is more to be found down in the silt.
“The creek continued outside the boundaries of the quarry, so it’s off our site – but the next person who gets a chance to investigate will find more boats, I can almost guarantee it.”
© Guardian News and Media 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/04/a ... age-boats/
A fleet of eight prehistoric boats, including one almost nine metres long, has been discovered in a Cambridgeshire quarry on the outskirts of Peterborough.
The vessels, all deliberately sunk more than 3,000 years ago, are the largest group of bronze age boats ever found in the same UK site and most are startlingly well preserved. One is covered inside and out with decorative carving described by conservator Ian Panter as looking “as if they’d been playing noughts and crosses all over it”. Another has handles carved from the oak tree trunk for lifting it out of the water. One still floated after 3,000 years and one has traces of fires lit on the wide flat deck on which the catch was evidently cooked.
Several had ancient repairs, including clay patches and an extra section shaped and pinned in where a branch was cut away. They were preserved by the waterlogged silt in the bed of a long-dried-up creek, a tributary of the river Nene, which buried them deep below the ground.
“There was huge excitement over the first boat, and then they were phoning the office saying they’d found another, and another, and another, until finally we were thinking, ‘Come on now, you’re just being greedy,’” Panter said.
The boats were deliberately sunk into the creek, as several still had slots for transoms – boards closing the stern of the boat – which had been removed.
Archaeologists are struggling to understand the significance of the find. Whatever the custom meant to the bronze age fishermen and hunters who lived in the nearby settlement, it continued for centuries. The team from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit is still waiting for the results of carbon 14 dating tests, but believes the oldest boats date from around 1,600 BC and the most recent 600 years later.
They already knew the creek had great significance – probably as a rich source of fish and eels – as in previous seasons at the Much Farm site they had found ritual deposits of metalwork, including spears.
The boats themselves may have been ritual offerings, or may have been sunk for more pragmatic reasons, to keep the timber waterlogged and prevent it from drying out and splitting when not in use – but in that case it seems strange that such precious objects were never retrieved.
Some of the boats were made from huge timbers, including one from an oak which must have had a metre-thick trunk and stood up to 20 metres tall. This would have been a rare specimen as sea levels rose and the terrain became more waterlogged, creating the Fenland landscape of marshes, creeks and islands of gravel.
“Either this was the Bermuda Triangle for bronze age boats, or there is something going on here that we don’t yet understand,” Panter said.
Kerry Murrell, the site director, said: “Some show signs of long use and repair – but others are in such good condition they look as if you could just drop the transom board back in and paddle away.”
The boats were all nicknamed by the team, including Debbie – made of lime wood, and therefore deemed a blonde – and French Albert the Fifth Musketeer, the fifth boat found. Murrell’s favourite is Vivienne, a superb piece of craftsmanship where the solid oak was planed down with bronze tools to the thickness of a finger, still so light and buoyant that when their trench filled with rainwater, they floated it into its cradle for lifting and transportation.
Because the boats were in such striking condition, they have been lifted intact and transported two miles, in cradles of scaffolding poles and planks, for conservation work at the Flag Fen archaeology site – where a famous timber causeway contemporary with the boats was built up over centuries until it stretched foralmost a mile across the fens.
“My first thought was to deal with them in the usual way, by chopping them into more manageably sized chunks, but when I actually saw them they just looked so nice, I thought we had to find another way,” Panter, an expert on waterlogged timber from York Archaeological Trust, said. “I think if I’d arrived on the site with a chainsaw, the team would have strung me up.”
Must Farm, now a quarry owned by Hanson UK, which has funded the excavation, has already yielded a wealth of evidence of prehistoric life, including a settlement built on a platform partly supported by stilts in the water, where artefacts including fabrics woven from wool, flax and nettles were found. Instead of living as dry-land hunters and farmers, the people had become experts at fishing: one eel trap found near the boats is identical to those still used by Peter Carter, the last traditional eel fisherman in the region.
The boats will be on display from Wednesday at Flag Fen, viewed through windows in a container chilled to below 5c – funded with a £100,000 grant from English Heritage which regards their discovery as of outstanding importance – built within a barn at the site. At the moment conservation technician Emma Turvey, dressed in layers of winter clothes, is spending up to eight hours a day spraying the timbers to keep them waterlogged and remove any potentially decaying impurities. They will then be impregnated with a synthetic wax, polyethylene glycol, before being gradually dried out over the next two years for permanent display.
Murrell is convinced there is more to be found down in the silt.
“The creek continued outside the boundaries of the quarry, so it’s off our site – but the next person who gets a chance to investigate will find more boats, I can almost guarantee it.”
© Guardian News and Media 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/04/a ... age-boats/
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Minimalist
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Re: Bronze-Age Boats
Ah.....boats!
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
-- George Carlin
-- George Carlin
Re: Bronze-Age Boats
Two great posts!
“The bulk of the hull was cut, using bronze adzes, from two huge oak trunks. Once shaped, they were "sewn together" using yew withies and sealed with moss and tallow.”
I had never heard of sewing together two halves of a dugout.
That was a true inspiration to overcome what I think is an inherent dugout limitation.
I have been in a dugout and was not impressed with it’s stability.
The basic shape is just too round.
You can understand why the Polynesians came up with the outrigger concept.
I seem to recall that somewhere they would fill the freshly dug out hull with hot water and then slowly wedge the gunnels apart to get a wider and flatter hull.
The ones you see on the Amazon seem to be pretty wide for their depth.
“The bulk of the hull was cut, using bronze adzes, from two huge oak trunks. Once shaped, they were "sewn together" using yew withies and sealed with moss and tallow.”
I had never heard of sewing together two halves of a dugout.
That was a true inspiration to overcome what I think is an inherent dugout limitation.
I have been in a dugout and was not impressed with it’s stability.
The basic shape is just too round.
You can understand why the Polynesians came up with the outrigger concept.
I seem to recall that somewhere they would fill the freshly dug out hull with hot water and then slowly wedge the gunnels apart to get a wider and flatter hull.
The ones you see on the Amazon seem to be pretty wide for their depth.
Re: Bronze-Age Boats
This is a very exciting discovery....how great it would be to see the faces of the people involved at the moment of discovery.
Regards Ernie