A sewn boat is a type of wooden boat which has its planks sewn, stitched, tied, or bound together with natural fibre rope (e.g., coir in the Indian Ocean) or flexible wood, such as roots and willow branches.A.H.J. Prins, 1986. Handbook of Sewn Boats: The Ethnography and Archaeology of Archaic Plank-Built Craft. Maritime Monographs and Reports No.59. Greenwich, London: The National Maritime Museum.(187 p’s) Sewn boat construction techniques were used in many parts of the world prior to the development of metal fasteners, and continued to be used long after that time for small boats to reduce construction costs where metal fasteners were too expensive.McGrail S. and Kentley, E., 1985. Sewn plank boats: Archaeological and Ethnographic papers based on those presented to a conferences at Greenwich in November 1984. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
lashed-lug boat is used in the distinctive maritime technology of Austronesian peoples.
While wooden pegs (often called treenails) can be used to fasten thicker clinker planks, this technique only works if the planks are thick enough to hold the pegs. Because of this, large ships were often built using pegs, while smaller boats would use sewn planks.McCarthy, M., 2005. Ships' fastenings: from sewn boat to steamship. Texas A&M University Press.
The replica of the Belitung shipwreck, Jewel of Muscat, was built mostly by Indian shipwrights with extensive experience of sewn planking construction. The coir ropes used to sew the planks together were tightened to very close to their breaking strain. (This is in contrast to the much lower sewing tensions proposed in an earlier theoretical model.) The multiple stitches at each pair of holes and the relatively close spacing of those holes mean that there is a substantial clamping force holding the edges of the planks together. This has shown to have good structural properties and the designer argues that this is superior to a similar vessel with metal fastenings, where those fastenings concentrate forces whilst sewing distributes them across the hull structure.
A well-known early example of a sewn boat is the long "solar barque" or funerary boat on show near the Gizeh pyramid in Egypt; it dates back from c. 2500 BC. The sewn construction was a natural step when coming from raft or reed boatbuilding, which dates from some thousands of years before that. The oldest sea-going vessel was the Zambratija boat in Croatia, c. 1200 BC. In other parts of the world, the oldest sewn craft comes from Ferriby Boats, where one sample (called F3) mass-spectrometry dates to 2030 BC. Later finds include some early Greek ships. The oldest Nordic find is the Hjortspring boat in Denmark (c 300 BC). In Finland, Russia, Karelia and Estonia small sewn boats have been constructed more recently; until the 1920s in poor areas of Russia.e.g. Litwin, J., 1985. Sewn Craft of the 19th Century in the European part of Russia. In McGrail S and Kentley: 253-268.h
Sewn construction is used in the various forms of the Austronesian "" of the Indo-Pacific (which also used the lashed-lug techniques)
and the and dhow native to the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean.Ralph K. Pedersen. "Traditional Arabic watercraft and the ark of the Gilgamesh epic: interpretations and realizations." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabic Studies 34 (2004) 231-238, p.231. Despite their proximity and similarity, they differ markedly from each other, indicating that they developed independently. Austronesian boat-sewing techniques are discontinuous and are only visible from the inside surfaces of the hull, while South Asian and Middle Eastern boat-sewing techniques are visible in both the exterior and interior of the hull and are continuous.
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