There is reason to believe that small craft are better represented among Bronze Age model boats. Wedde's catalogue lists 50 models, 9 from the EBA, 5 from the MBA, and 36 from the LBA, with the largest group in LH/LM III. Unlike iconographic images, models, as three-dimensional objects, permit measurement of beam and can be used to calculate ratios of length, width, and depth of hull, but only a small number of the models are sufficiently preserved to allow measurement of all these dimensions. The pattern, cited above, that the measurable models cluster around a 1:3 width to length ratio suggests to Wedde (2000: 108) either a class of Aegean Bronze Age boats that were beamier than two-dimensional images suggest, similar perhaps in ratio and function to the Uluburun merchant ship, or that the models depict mainly small boats.18 In favor of the latter interpretation is the generally simple (sometimes crude) execution of the models and the lack of elaborate attachments and decorations; often a few tholes or thwarts are the only molded attachments if any are present at all. Rarely a mast step or stump is present to indicate a sailing vessel (W301, 314, 323). Some models, notably in LH/LM III, were painted with banded and other linear decoration, or in some cases even more elaborate motifs, with clear parallels in painted fineware pottery and figurines (see Figs. 2.8, 3.2). The simplicity of many models and the width to length ratios are suggestive, but not conclusive, that these models are more representative of small boats than beamy cargo ships. Because many come from the mainland as well as islands (including Crete) under Mycenaean influence in LH III, the boat models form a significant body of material to illuminate coastal interactions at regional and local scales.
Ethnographic Analogies
The benefits and dangers of using ethnographic analogy to illuminate poorly understood aspects of the distant past were discussed in Chapter 2. When considering the forms and functions of boats, it is questionable whether analogies from contexts distant in space and time or from recent and historical times in Greece will be of much help, beyond the general assertion, already made, that the technology of small boats used in local and microregional settings is more conservative and enduring than that of larger seagoing ships. A more persuasive application of ethnographic data parses the relationships between the physical and performance characteristics of a boat, the mariners who sail it, and the relationships of maritime societies with the sea and with other maritime societies. Much of this information is important explicitly because we possess no tangible evidence to reconstruct nonmaterial aspects of Mycenaean maritime life, and ethnographic accounts provide new and diverse ways of thinking about them. The insights that can be gained from ethnographic data are taken up mainly in subsequent chapters in discussions of navigation and intersocietal interactions.
As indicated by the earlier quote from Greenhill and Morrison, local ship technology results from a complex combination of environmental and social conditions. The factors that make boats similar or different across space and time are conditioned on the one hand by the building materials, tools, and general level of technology available, and on the other hand by the tasks to be carried out in boats, which are shaped by subsistence patterns and by social needs (relationships of trade, kinship, friendship, intermarriage, etc.) within society and with people in distant locations. Because of the complex interplay of these factors, boats in societies facing similar environmental conditions and having comparable social structures may be dissimilar, while quite similar boats may be produced by societies sharing few social and environmental circumstances. The latter case is possible because certain universal factors come into play in simple boat technology. One of these concerns the widespread use of trees and plants as sources of construction material. Humans learned independently in many places that long tree trunks could be hollowed out to make dugout canoes, and long experience with the hydrodynamics of the form resulted in various modifications that responded to conditions both local and universal. In the Aegean, the dugout canoe was apparently used during the Neolithic and persisted into the EBA, attested by four hammered lead boat models from EC II Naxos (W105—108) whose forms are remarkably similar to canoes in recent Pacific island traditions. Although the Early Cycladic longboat is an apparent descendant of the dugout canoe, dugout construction was replaced by plank-built ships and boats already in the third millennium BC. As we have seen, stalks of different plants (papyrus and giant fennel) had analogous uses in Bronze Age Egypt and modern Corfu, resulting in boats of similar form and function in two vastly different social settings. One way to make sensible use of comparative data on boat form and function is to draw upon performance characteristics derived from ethnographic observation as well as experimental testing of reconstructed “ancient" boats.
World History
