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Ships and Boats
Boats and ships have long been essential tools for mobility, communication, trade, and exploration, connecting communities across rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. This collection brings together experimental archaeological studies that investigate ancient watercraft through reconstruction, building, use, and long-term testing. From dugout canoes and skin-covered vessels to Viking ships and archaeological rafts, these projects explore how past peoples designed, constructed, maintained, and navigated their craft. The articles demonstrate how practical experimentation can reveal technological choices, nautical capabilities, crew requirements, and patterns of maritime movement that are difficult to reconstruct from archaeological remains alone.
To complement the articles in this collection, EXARC's YouTube playlist brings together a range of video resources related to boats, ships, and maritime experimentation. The playlist includes presentations delivered at EXARC conferences, recordings featuring experimental archaeology projects, and episode of the EXARC podcast. As a visual and audio companion to the written articles, the playlist provides further opportunities to explore the challenges and achievements of maritime experimental archaeology. Check the Playlist
Featured
Dug Boat Dance: Contemporary Body and Prehistoric Experience
The Monoxylon Expeditions: The starting Points of a Nautical Archaeological Experiment
Roar Ege: The Lifecycle of a Reconstructed Viking Ship
***In 1962, the remains of five late Viking Age ships were excavated from Roskilde Fjord, near Skuldelev on the Danish island of Zealand (See Figure 1: Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002). Twenty years later, the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde began the process of building its first full-scale Viking ship reconstruction, the 14 m long coastal transport and trading vessel, Skuldelev 3.
The Construction of a Skin-on-Frame Coracle at Kierikki Stone Age Centre
The Construction of a Skin-on-Frame Canoe at Kierikki Stone Age Centre, Finland, as a Medium for Group Training in Ancient Skills and Experiential Learning
The Gislinge Boat Open Source Project: An Old Boat and a New Idea
The Prometheus Project
***The Prometheus Project was an experimental archaeological investigation carried out at Butser Ancient Farm, Hampshire, England, into prehistoric logboat building techniques. The project focused on exploring the use of fire in building logboats...
The Theory of the Archaeological Raft: Motivation, Method, and Madness in Experimental Archaeology
Between 1947 and 2006, nearly forty expeditions set out in recreated maritime drift vessels to demonstrate hypotheses with varying levels of relevance to archaeology and cultural diffusion. This paper divides the motivations of these expeditions into four major categories...