Post-medieval seafaring in the Western Black Sea: archaeological and iconographic evidence for the rig

Abstract

This thesis aims to research the wide topic of post-medieval Western Black Sea seafaring, particularly focusing on the rig. Two main datasets collected in the last eight years form the core of this dissertation, and provide the nautical data of the research. The first consists of several late medieval shipwrecks with extremely well-preserved upper structures, including rigging elements, discovered on the bottom of the Bulgarian Black Sea during the three field seasons of the M.A.P. Black Sea – the first high-tech archaeological project ever undertaken in the world. However, the rigging remains are used mainly as a comparative material in supporting the follow up analysis of the second dataset – a group of post-medieval ship graffiti carved in four medieval churches in Nessebar, Bulgaria. A thorough analysis of the shipwrecks’ remains is due to be published by their principal researcher – Professor Kroum Batchvarov. The corpus of nearly 340 ship graffiti was recorded non-destructively using advanced photographic methods during a three-season project which I coordinated. All of the ship graffiti are included in the catalogue which constitutes Appendix A of the current thesis. For the purposes of analysis and interpretation of the two datasets, complementary sources of information on rigging such as other regional-based iconographic examples, travellers’ accounts, published historical evidence, marine art’s illustrations, and ship’s modellers works were used.
The research presented in the current thesis is one of the few studies of Western Black Sea seafaring which uses the maritime archaeology approach. The theoretical framework of the thesis follows traditional, processualist, and post-processualist ideas. It uses historical contextualisation to better understand the events that impacted the life of local maritime communities, and the inevitable technological changes. Three main tools were used in the analysis of the two datasets – comparison, interpretation, and reconstruction.
The analysis of the two datasets provided two different, complementary results: the archaeological remains revealed details about individual rigging elements, while the iconography illustrated overall rigging silhouettes and the variety of ship types that sailed in the region in the post-medieval period.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Zdravka Hristova Georgieva: orcid.org/0000-0001-5842-5085

ORCID for Helen Farr: orcid.org/0000-0002-7922-9179

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