Not Dead Yet: The Surviving Voice of Wooden Shipbuilding

Author(s): Nathaniel Howe

Year: 2015

Summary

In the Pacific Northwest there is still significant overlap between archaeological material and extant cultural niches.  This overlap enables ethnography and living history to privide critical insight.  For nautical archaeologists, the enigmatic details of early west coast ship construction may be explained by the handful of shipwrights who still work on the region's commercial wooden fishing fleet today.  These tradesmen, however, are the last of their kind.  The wooden fleet is dwindling and soon it will disappear along with generations of accumulated knowledge.  While the Northwest's rare overlap of living and bygone trades still exists, Northwest Seaport in Seattle is focusing on recording this knowledge in the process of restoring its museum ship fleet, combining archaeological research with the insight of the last generation of traditional shipwrights.

Cite this Record

Not Dead Yet: The Surviving Voice of Wooden Shipbuilding. Nathaniel Howe. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Seattle, Washington. 2015 ( tDAR id: 434114)

Keywords

Temporal Keywords
21st Century

Spatial Coverage

min long: -141.003; min lat: 41.684 ; max long: -52.617; max lat: 83.113 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 609