This dissertation is rooted in one general question: what can the wood from ships
reveal about the people and cultures who built them? Shipwrecks are only the last
chapter of a complex story, and while the last fifty years of nautical archaeology have
managed to rewrite a number of these chapters, much of the information unrelated to a
ship’s final voyage remains a mystery. However, portions of that mystery can be
exposed by an examination of the timbers.
An approach for the cultural investigation of ship timbers is presented and
attempts are made to establish the most reliable information possible from the largely
unheralded treasures of underwater excavations: timbers. By introducing the written
record, iconographic record, and the social, economic, and political factors to the
archaeological record a more complete analysis of the cultural implications of ship and
boat timbers is possible. I test the effectiveness of the approach in three varied casestudies
to demonstrate its limits and usefulness: ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, the
Mediterranean under Athenian influence, and Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula during
the Discoveries. The results of these studies demonstrate how ship timbers can be
studied in order to better understand the people who built the vessels.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-12-8610 |
| Date | 2010 December 1900 |
| Creators | Creasman, Pearce |
| Contributors | Vieira de Castro, Filipe |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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