Research and Reconstruction of Wooden Ships

Filipe Castro

Introduction

This course is an introduction to the basic technical skills required for recording, representing and interpreting ship archaeological remains.  Students are expected to develop a practical approach to the conceptualization and design of a ship.  This course is divided in three parts: recording a shipwreck, reconstructing a ship from its archaeological remains, and producing a comprehensive ship project.

Upon completion of ANTH616 students are expected to be familiar with:

1.  the particular vocabulary of shipbuilding;
2.  the basic rules and methods to map an archaeological site;
3.  the basic rules and methods to record hull remains: how to quantify and represent 3D curves on paper and how to produce a clear and comprehensive set of documents with all relevant records pertaining to a particular set of ship’s hull remains;
4.  the basic principles of ship construction, in terms of the structural components of a ship and its construction sequence;
5.  the process of designing a ship’s hull in the three standard views of the so-called “lines drawings” of a vessel;
6.  the basic rules to reconstruct an archaeologically excavated ship’s hull and formulate an educated guess about the vessel’s probable size, shape and structural composition;
7.  the standards for graphic representation of ship’s hulls and their components;
8.  the basic rules of hull analysis.