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Sailing Through Time...

Yithian

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Dark Age boat recovered

By Carolyn Fry

A wooden boat left on a river bank in the Dark Ages has been lifted from mudflats near Portsmouth.

Archaeologists hope the dug-out canoe and the sediments that preserved it for 1,500 years will shed light on past climate, sea levels and daily life in the south of England.

"It's most likely that the boat would have been used by people to go into the harbour to fish or hunt birds," explained Gavin Stone, Assistant Archaeologist at the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology (HWTMA).

"It's a useful find because there's little documentary evidence from the Dark Ages period."

Protruding timbers

The oak vessel was discovered last spring, when two local enthusiasts saw a piece of wood protruding from the mud in Langstone Harbour.

HWTMA planned to build a cage round the boat and lift it whole, but the wood was badly cracked so archaeologists excavated it piece by piece.

This means the sediments underneath have been relatively undisturbed and may yield valuable information about how the local environment has changed over time.

The boat, which measures roughly 1.7 by 0.8 metres (5.6 by 2.6 feet) but which is broken off at the stern, is now in storage at the British Ocean Sediment Core Research Facility at Southampton Oceanography Centre.

Tree-ring dating

Radio carbon dating has placed the canoe's age somewhere between 400 and 640 AD, a period spanning late Roman times, through the Dark Ages to early Saxon.

This makes it the oldest boat ever found in the Solent.

Over the coming months dendrochronologist and wood technology expert Nigel Nayling will analyse the tree's growth rings to try and obtain a more accurate age.

"Hopefully at a later date we'll also have a better idea of the size it would have been before it broke, and from that we'll be able to deduce how many people it could have taken and what kind of load it carried," says Stone.

Rob Scaife, a palaeoenvironmentalist with expert knowledge of pollen and tiny creatures called diatoms and foraminifera will also examine samples.

He may be able to see whether the local river system was freshwater 1,500 years ago, prior to being inundated by the Solent.

The remains of microscopic organisms he encounters may also indicate how warm the climate was at the time.

"Hopefully by Christmas the experts will have looked at it and will be starting to draw some conclusions," says Stone.

"There are also some other artefacts in the location, including wattle work, flint arrow-heads and pottery, and we'd like to take a closer look at those. There's a lot of archaeology out there." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3096846.stm
 
The only thing that puzzles me here is what brought this particular wreck into the limelight?

The mudflats of harbours around Britain are littered with wrecks of various ages. Some are just derelicts, still clearly recognizable as old sailing barges, WWII patrol boats, fishing boats, etc, and many more are rotted down to just a few timbers sticking out of the mud.

So what drew people's attention to the Langstone wreck in the first place?
 
Maybe an archaeologist happened to be driving past and thought 'bloody hell, that's a Dark Age boat!' There are archaeologists who would do that. I know one of them.
 
rynner said:
The only thing that puzzles me here is what brought this particular wreck into the limelight?

Apparently 'two local enthusiasts' spotted the wood sticking up out of the sand. Could be blind luck or perhaps they had a inkling there'd be something to find - old sources or fragments discovered?. Could either costal errosion or mild seismic activity have 'revealed' parts of the wreck for the first time? Certainly a lump of 'fashioned' oak appearing from the sands one morning would spark my curiosity.

Just guessing.
:)
 
The Yithian said:
Could either costal errosion or mild seismic activity have 'revealled' parts of the wreck for the first time? Certainly a lump of 'fashioned' oak appearing from the sands one morning would spark my curiosity.
Yes, old wrecks do cover and uncover from time to time. But as I said, wrecks of all ages are pretty common, and often consist of just a stem or stern post sticking out of the mud., and maybe a few frames (ribs) too.

Yes it would interest me too, but what marked this one out for tree-ring and radio-carbon dating?
 
The oak vessel was discovered last spring, when two local enthusiasts saw a piece of wood protruding from the mud in Langstone Harbour.

The right people in the right place at the right time, serendipity.
 
I've sailed much of the coast of Britain over several years, and there are such wrecks (ie, bits of rotten wood sticking out of the mud) everywhere! Go to any tidal harbour, and such sights are common.

The point I'm trying to make is that news reports don't tell the whole story. Something signalled to someone that this wreck was special - but that bit of the story is missing.

As an old sailor man, I'm fascinated by nautical history and marine archaeology (and I fancy I'm fairly knowledgable in these fields) - I'd like to know what detail tipped off the discoverers that this particular bit of rotten wood (covered in mud, weed, etc) differed from other bits of rotten wood (covered in mud, weed, etc) which might have been only one or two hundred years old.

How did they pick a single diamond out of a scatter of costume jewellery?



All right, I'll shut up now! :)
 
There's a small update here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-14288357

And a search for that led me to this:

Screen Shot 2017-07-08 at 00.07.51.png


A retired fisherman has discovered an ancient stone head that experts say could be 24,000 years old — the oldest found in Britain reports The Times. Arthur Mack, 70, found the 5in stone head while he was walking off Long Island in Langstone Harbour, Hampshire. Archaeologists say the find could be a piece of Neanderthal art made by cave dwellers who were once thought too primitive for creative thinking. A similar stone head was found in a Neanderthal cave in northern France and was dated to 28,000BC.

The ancient stone would have been carved into a face by a caveman thousands of years ago. Mr Mack, of Portsmouth, said: “There was a face poking out of the cliffs in some mud and it scared the living daylights out of me. I think the tide must have exposed it.

“I have found stone flints and axe heads before but nothing like this. It is a work of art and shows how much skill these ancient civilisations had."

Screen Shot 2017-07-08 at 00.10.17.png


Source: The Times 02/10/2004 via: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146411858
 
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