16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

107 Zadar, Croatia | 26 September – 1 October 2021 Mariangela Nicolardi 1 , Mauro Bondioli 1 & Irena Radić Rossi 2 1 ARS NAUTICA Institute for Maritime Heritage– Italian branch, Venice, Italy 2 University of Zadar, Department of Archaeology, Zadar, Croatia The Contribution of historical sources in the reconstruction of the Nin 1 original hull form The ships Nin 1 and Nin 2 were discovered in the late 1960s in Nin, north of Zadar. They were recovered in 1974, and tentatively dated to the 11 th century AD. In the late 1990s two vessels inspired by the archaeological finds were built, but their construction process did not fully consider all of the archaeologically recovered ship characteristics, leaving the modern vessels as something less than replicas of the ships excavated at Nin. Reconstruction of the original form of a medieval wreck is a complex hy- pothetical process, in which the quality and quantity of the archaeological data considerably affects the reliability of the final result. However, every wreck pre- sents problems of structural distortion and fragmentation that must be solved in some way to arrive at a coherent and convincing result. For this reason, the reconstruction process is inevitably subject to methodologies of study, interpre- tations and choices which, in any case, can never lead to a single and incontro- vertible solution. In general, the difference between these methodologies lies in the type of approach to the object of research and the criteria for the analysis. In many cases the archaeological data relating to a wreck are analyzed with an approach and methodology strictly connected to the criteria of modern naval engineering to obtain an optimal and measurable hull form in terms of efficiency and sailing performance. The main purpose of this method is to discover the technological level reached in the geo-cultural area at the time of the ship’s construction. The aim of our poster, realized in the framework of the NEREAS Project (IP 2020-02-3420), is to illustrate a different approach to the problem, using written and iconographic sources on medieval and late medieval shipbuilding. In other words, we intend to contextualize the wreck from the historical-technical point of view and to formulate a hypothesis regarding the design system and tools used by the builder to conceive the forms and to outline the structures of the hull.