16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

43 Zadar, Croatia | 26 September – 1 October 2021 Massimiliano Ditta 1 & Jens Auer 2 1 Museum Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway 2 Landesamt für Kultur und Denkmalpflege, Landesarchäologie, Schwerin, Germany Visualising a “Big Ship”. The reconstruction of a 12 th century cargo vessel found in the harbour of Wismar At the ISBSA 15 in Marseille the authors presented the preliminary results of the excavation of a Medieval cargo vessel, built from oak and pine sourced from western Sweden in the period 1184-90 AD. The wreck was recovered as a result of the expansion of the port of Wismar in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in Northern Germany. As the project was still in an early stage, the presentation mainly focussed on the construction of the ship, which was built in the Nordic clinker tradition. Since then, the full documentation of the wreck has been completed and the timbers are currently undergoing conservation treatment. In order to analyse and compare the hull-shape, a digital reconstruction has been carried out in Rhinoceros3D, using a three-dimensional scan of the as-found model of the wreck as a basis. Lines extracted from the model were integrated with data from comparative sites for the lofting of the hull. The digi- tal fairing process was controlled and verified using three- dimensional scans of the internal timbers. This paper discusses the methodology used for the archaeological recon- struction and presents the results of the hull analysis. Finally, the Wismar ship is compared with contemporary ship finds with a view to explore its place in the development of the sailing cargo vessel in the 12 th and 13 th Century.