A Maritime Archaeology of Ships

Innovation and Social Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

J. R. Adams

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782970453
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

In the last fifty years the investigation of maritime archaeological sites in the sea, in the coastal zone and in their interconnecting locales, has emerged as one of archaeology's most dynamic and fast developing fields. No longer a niche interest, maritime archaeology is recognised as having central relevance in the integrated study of the human past. Within maritime archaeology the study of watercraft has been understandably prominent and yet their potential is far from exhausted. In this book Jon Adams evaluates key episodes of technical change in the ways that ships were conceived, designed, built, used and disposed of. As technological puzzles they have long confounded explanation but when viewed in the context of the societies in which they were created, mysteries begin to dissolve. Shipbuilding is social practice and as one of the most complex artefacts made, changes in their technology provide a lens through which to view the ideologies, strategies and agency of social change. Adams argues that the harnessing of shipbuilding was one of the ways in which medieval society became modern and, while the primary case studies are historical, he also demonstrates that the relationships between ships and society have key implications for our understanding of prehistory in which seafaring and communication had similarly profound effects on the tide of human affairs.

1

Pathways and Ideas

Premises

How and why things change (and why they don’t) are central concerns of archaeology, being imprinted on and variously visible in the material remains of past human existence: the archaeological record. As changes in material culture imply changes in the society that produced it, the technologies used in its production provide one of the primary means of analysing the nature of those changes and their trajectories. In other words an archaeological study of technology is necessarily a study of change and indeed of stasis, both being active processes involving a dynamic relationship with society. It is however episodes of change with which this book is chiefly concerned, and among the myriad forms that material culture may take, boats and ships were often the most complex expressions of technology that societies achieved. The production, use and disposal of watercraft involved complex patterns of behaviour and communication within and between communities. Hence the material culture of water transport offers one of the best means of interrogating changes within past societies, especially considering the ‘fine-grained’ nature of the remains preserved in marine, riverine and lacustrine environments.

Formerly it is debatable how far nautical research capitalised on these advantages. We tended to focus on ships as technological phenomena per se rather than relating them to the contexts of their production. This produced a database of increasing richness, heavily augmented by material discovered under water. But while the database constituted an eloquent record of change having happened it did not explain it. On the contrary, technologically orientated research, especially when entrapped in simplistic, linear, evolutionist frameworks, has generated a series of problems that have repeatedly defied solution. Might these puzzles be more easily solved when investigated within the social contexts in which those technologies were conceived and created? The publications of synthetic analyses of major projects over the last decade show how things have progressed but even these are necessarily focused on individual sites and vessels.

This book aims to complement this research by addressing wider but unifying themes through a series of medieval and post-medieval ships that represent the major shipbuilding traditions of northern Europe. Although they are considered chronologically, this is not a narrative history of ships but rather the basis for focusing on key episodes of technological change. Re-examination of these ships in the contexts both of their building tradition and of the wider societies in which they were produced reveals new causal factors and explanatory relationships.

From the vantage point of the ships themselves this approach also provides new perspectives on their respective societies, highlighting aspects that otherwise remain opaque. The relationship between social change and its manifestation in shipping not only reaffirms the role of ships in the most significant developments of the medieval and modern worlds but as highly significant agents in the transition between them. The strength of this relationship also suggests that the archaeological boat record is one of the most potent but as yet under-exploited ways of investigating prehistory.

Context and scope

A book on the archaeology of ships is in one sense rooted in what Keith Muckelroy defined as ‘nautical archaeology’ in that it focuses, at least initially, on ship technology (Muckelroy 1978:4). Yet in line with the stated premises it aims to interpret this technology in a social context, encompassing the ways ships are conceived, designed, constructed, used and disposed of. As the activities of shipbuilding and seafaring constitute social practice, the associated material culture provides an indispensable means for the analysis and interpretation of societies that have utilised water transport and engaged in maritime activity in general. In this sense it goes beyond what Muckelroy saw as the bounding limits for his preferred term maritime archaeology, defined by him as ‘the scientific study of the material remains of man and his activities on the sea! (ibid.), for it necessarily addresses ‘…related objects on the shore’ and ‘…coastalcommunities’, aspects explicitly ruled out of his definition (Muckelroy 1978:6). This book not only addresses those related objects and communities but also social factors that are not necessarily even located on the waterfront. Indeed these include aspects that are immaterial as well as material, and so in another important sense this study ventures beyond what Keith would have regarded as the proper limits of archaeology: ‘ Of course, archaeological evidence possesses its own inherent weaknesses, notably in being unable to shed light on people’s motives or ideas…’ (Muckelroy 1978:216). Most archaeologists now take a more ambitious line, allowing that cognitive and symbolic aspects of past societies can indeed be inferred or ‘read’ from their material remains, though in what ways and to what degree is hotly debated. In the light of this greater scope and taking Muckelroy’s scientific component of archaeology as a given, one might therefore suggest that maritime archaeology is the study of the remains of past human activities on the seas, interconnected waterways and adjacent locales.

These differences in perspective are not intended as a negative critique of Muckelroy’s definitions or of his general theoretical stance, especially as by the time of his tragic death in 1980 he was already exploring other avenues. The scale of his achievement remains undiminished, and among those who worked with him I am not alone in having wondered, at tricky moments of archaeological decision, what he would have done in the circumstances. So although things he regarded as limitations are now seen as legitimate challenges for a host of approaches across the archaeological spectrum, much of what follows is still in tune with his general vision for the development of this branch of the discipline.

That being the case, like McGrail (1984:12) who also felt the criteria set by Muckelroy to be too narrow, I nevertheless regard ‘maritime archaeology’ as the most suitable term for the multiplicity of source material concerned, even when focusing on ship-related research questions (Adams 2002a).

The material presented here is inevitably drawn from past as well as current work, so, although a comprehensive account of the development of maritime archaeology is not within the scope of this book,¹ its theoretical orientation and objectives need to be made explicit in the context of recent thinking. What follows therefore is less a comprehensive historical narrative than a map of approaches and ideas that evaluates some of the key events, factors and people that have contributed to the subject’s current state and of the investigative context within which that work was conceived and carried out. This begins with an assessment of early underwater work, firstly because that is where most of the ships with which this book is concerned were found, and secondly, by identifying the formative ideas and theories that drove that work and mapping them onto the general archaeological thinking of the time, we can more clearly understand the nature of the subject as it is currently practiced.

In turn archaeological thinking itself requires some benchmarking, especially as over the period in question, more than half a century, archaeology’s theory has been far from static. An added complication is that while it has moved through more or less distinctive phases the trajectory has not been uniform even within the various sectors of the discipline let alone globally. In relation to maritime developments however culture-historical models of the past constructed on the basis of empirical observation and description prevailed, broadly speaking, until the 1960s when, initially in North America and Europe, they were challenged by the New Archaeology, overtly scientific, generalist and processual in its approach (Binford 1972). In its turn the New Archaeology was challenged in the early 1980s by ‘post-processual’ contextual approaches (Hodder 1986). Some European archaeologists still identify themselves as post-processual but others resist being categorised and today no single perspective dominates although there are international differences in emphasis. The characteristics of these theoretical schools will become clearer below but for a thorough yet digestible analysis the reader is directed to Johnson (1999, 2011).

Foundations

Opinions vary as to who directed the first truly archaeological excavation carried out under water, partly because of the criteria deployed. If it is implicit that the director should have archaeological training, this rules out several notable excavations that occurred before any archaeologist ventured into the water. One that is relevant to subsequent discussion was directed by Carl Ekman, a Swedish naval officer who excavated the Swedish warship Elefanten (1564) between 1933 and 1939 (Ekman 1934, 1942). His work was systematic, thorough (especially considering the technology then available to him) and remarkably modern in that it was carried out for predefined reasons of research and heritage preservation rather than casual curiosity or financial gain. His rationale, albeit ideologically coloured by his naval historian’s view, was that the remains of ships so significant in Sweden’s past and thereby of the 16th-century shipbuilder’s art, must be saved and preserved in a museum setting (Cederlund 1983:46, 1994). In this, as will be seen, he was largely successful.

In the late 1950s a French naval officer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his Undersea Research Group excavated an amphora mound at Grande Congloué, near Marseilles, using the new aqualung he had developed with engineer Emile Gagnan.² Cousteau is often credited with being the first to use airlifts for archaeological excavation (e.g. Bass 1966:125; Delgado 1997:22), but Ekman had used them on Elefanten in the 1930s (Cederlund 1983:48). Overall the archaeological standards at Grande Congloué were deemed inadequate even for the time. The effects of Cousteau’s work were nevertheless far reaching. He had set precedents and demonstrated the potential of the new SCUBA for controlled underwater excavation (Muckelroy 1978:14). But according to Philippe Diole (1954:150–170) this was not the first archaeological work carried out under water in France. In the 1940s Réné Beaucaire was excavating Roman domestic dwellings at Fos-sur-Mer in the Gulf of Saint-Gervais. Much of the site is now underwater so he literally followed it into the sea. In the relatively shallow waters some work was possible but opinions vary as to its extent and also on how much was achieved. It is interesting that neither Cousteau nor Beaucaire are celebrated as true pioneers of underwater archaeology in France. That accolade goes to Philippe Taillez, head of the French Navy Diving School at Toulon (Elisabeth Veyrat pers. comm.). He had worked with Cousteau at Grand Congloué but there the similarity ends, for in his excavation of a Roman wreck on the Titan Reef in 1952, he demonstrated an attitude towards underwater archaeological material that was ahead of its time (Du Plat Taylor 1967; Muckelroy 1978:14).

Other work that constituted a real advance was the excavation, also of a Roman wreck, at Albenga, by the Italian archaeologist Nino Lamboglia. He himself did not dive, nor apparently would he permit his archaeological assistants to do so, something that puzzled another of the subject’s pioneers, Peter Throckmorton, when he visited the site (Throckmorton 1987:22). Lamboglia relied on photography and what his non-archaeologist, professional divers told him, clearly a limitation. In contrast, the benefits of first hand observation were already being demonstrated by Honor Frost. With archaeological training and able to dive, she had worked with or knew many of these Mediterranean pioneers. She undertook various projects, some of them with Frédéric Dumas, an enlightened collaborator of Cousteau’s at Grande Congloué, others with Throckmorton, a visionary whose general contribution to the development of this new field was considerable. At this stage her work was more orientated to survey and recording than to excavation (Frost 1963) but among other things, she was establishing the true nature of features erroneously described by divers to the Jesuit priest Pierre André Poidebard (Frost 1972:97, 107). His excellent survey work of Levantine harbours in the 1930s using aerial photography was pioneering but in this instance had been compromised by the same limitation accepted by Lamboglia.

Perhaps the first example of a comprehensive, professionally directed underwater excavation that would satisfy any professional code of conduct today was carried out on the Bronze Age wreck at Cape Gelidonya, directed by George Bass in 1960. The conceptual difference that marks this out from earlier projects was Bass’s realisation that, although at a depth of 30m each person’s work would be limited to twenty or thirty minutes at a time, there was no reason for it not to conform to the minimum standards expected on land. As Muckelroy put it, this excavation ‘… allowed few if any concessions to the fact of being underwater… (Muckelroy 1978:15). The corollary of this was the requirement for a team that was recruited on the basis of skills relevant to archaeology rather than to diving (Bass 1966:18–19). Frost had thought it impossible for anyone to be both a professional archaeologist and a professional diver, so that if archaeology was to be successfully carried out under water, archaeologists would have to work closely with professional divers (Frost 1963:xi). Bass realised, as the major oil field diving companies were to, that it is easier to teach someone with a professional skill to dive than the other way round. This reversed the previous mode in which the archaeologist was seen as an adjunct to the team of ‘real’ divers. Of course there need be no difference and today many professional archaeologists are also professionally qualified divers. But whether they are or not, the principle is that archaeology whether on land or under water should be done by archaeologists, at least in the sense of controlling strategy and procedure,³ and this is what was done at Gelidonya.

The late 1950s and early 1960s was one of the key developmental periods in the theory and practice of this new field. Momentum had been building in various countries and several highly significant events occurred at much the same time. Not long after the Gelidonya excavation, Ulrich Ruoff was demonstrating the wholesale application of archaeological method on submerged prehistoric sites in the Swiss lakes (Ruoff 1972). Similarly painstaking excavation of the remains of five Viking ships found in Roskilde Fjord, Denmark, was taking place under Olaf Olsen and Ole Crumlin-Pedersen (Olsen and Crumlin-Pedersen 1967; Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen 2002). Although it had begun as an underwater investigation in 1957, it was then converted to a land excavation by the installation of a cofferdam. Even further north, in 1961 the salvage of the Swedish warship Vasa (1628) from Stockholm Harbour (Franzén 1967) set in motion an enormous archaeological investigation carried out by a team of eleven archaeologists under Per Lundström (Lundström 1962; Cederlund and Hocker 2006). The following year further dramatic ship finds were made: a medieval cog discovered in the River Weser at Bremen in Germany, and on the other side of the world the wreck of the VOC ship Batavia was discovered in Western Australia. Just as in Sweden and Denmark, these sites would play a significant part in the development of maritime archaeology in their respective countries. Batavia was excavated under water (Green 1975), but as with the Swedish and Danish finds, the archaeology of the Bremen cog, was largely carried out after the wreck had been recovered. They were nevertheless part of the growing corpus of potent ‘underwater’ archaeological finds.

Britain and Ireland’s tentative moves into this new field were characterised not by a single large scale project but by a flurry of shipwreck investigations from the Scillies to the Shetlands. Of note were a series of Armada wreck excavations directed by Colin Martin (Martin 1975; Martin and Parker 1988), in whose team was the young Keith Muckelroy. In parallel with these, several wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships were investigated including the Kennemerland (1664). It was on this site among others that Keith Muckelroy developed many of the ideas that underpinned his various seminal publications (Muckelroy 1975, 1977, 1978). In contrast to the substantial structures discovered in Germany and Scandinavia, Kennemerland’s hull was long gone. The ship survived only in the form of its guns, ballast and widely dispersed, largely fragmentary artefacts. Yet for maritime archaeology it proved fertile ground. This was just as well, for in 1967/68 Alexander McKee’s team had discovered the Tudor warship Mary Rose at Spithead, off Portsmouth, England. The ship itself was not seen until 1971 (Rule 1982:57) but by the mid 1970s the project was steadily gaining momentum. It drew on the experience of all the European and Scandinavian ship projects, in particular that of Vasa which was seen as the closest logistic (and ideological) parallel. Unlike them however, the entire excavation of the Mary Rose was to be carried out underwater prior to salvage. Because of this the project became a focus for methodological development in northern European waters. Published estimates vary, but it is clear that nearly 600 people completed some 30,000 dives, the equivalent of fourteen working years under-water.⁴

The momentum generated by all these projects was considerable and to a very real extent is ongoing, especially now that substantive reports have been published. The series of publications emanating from Roskilde established a new benchmark for such work (e.g. Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen 2002), followed by the first Serçe Limani volume (Bass et al. 2004), the first of the Vasa volumes (Cederlund and Hocker 2006) and all five volumes of the report on the Red Bay Basque whaler (Grenier et al. 2007). 2011 saw the publication of the fifth and final Mary Rose volume (Marsden 2003; Jones 2003; Gardiner 2005; Marsden 2009; Hildred 2011). Quite apart from these directly related aspects, such high-profile projects have significance for the discipline and society at large that extends beyond the intrinsic archaeological and historical value of the finds themselves. But despite these signal advances, these projects were still haunted by others that went under the banners of ‘marine’ or ‘nautical’ archaeology, etc. but which were nothing of the kind. So it is not surprising that, in terms of research strategy, there was little if any cohesion, even in regional terms let alone internationally. Momentum was increasing but often by unevenly lurching from one discovery to the next. In this sense the early years of the application of ‘archaeology’ in rivers, lakes and seas, as distinct from what Margaret Rule has dubbed ‘antiqueology’,⁵ was inevitably reactive in nature. In this environment it is not surprising that there was a lack of any coherent body of theory and practice. By the 1970s, if there was any identifiable paradigm, in a Kuhnian sense, it concerned methodology. The assumption was that there is a link between field techniques designed to ensure the successful collection of data and subsequent analysis and interpretation. In other words the only basis on which the new ‘sub-discipline’ could successfully contribute to archaeology as a whole, breaking free of association with antiquarianism and outright treasure salvage, was to develop an appropriate methodology. This was not confined to the art of digging neat holes in the sea...