16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

54 16 th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology Alessandro Ghidoni Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK Metal fastenings in the western Indian Ocean during the medieval period: new data from the Islamic site of al-Balid (10 th –16 th centuries), Oman The prevailing conceptualization of western Indian Ocean boatbuilding has been, for decades, that metal fastenings were either introduced or influenced by Euro- peans during the 16 th century CE. The lack of archaeological evidence for water- craft in the region, along with historical references to boats fastened with fibre cordage, led early scholars to assume that medieval western Indian Ocean vessels were exclusively sewn. However, archaeological discoveries such as the nailed planks of Quseir al-Qadim (12 th –15 th centuries) on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, and a shipwreck from Kerala, southwest India (10–13 th century), have provided evidence that chal- lenged the assumption that all western Indian Ocean vessels were sewn before the 16 th century. Unfortunately, the implications of these finds have been mostly unexplored. Recently discovered ship timbers from the Islamic port of al-Balid, Oman, displaying both sewing and oblique nails, provide the only evidence of a nail-con- struction technique in Arabia in the medieval period, and yield further data on the introduction of iron fastenings in the region. This paper examines these sets of evidence, focussing primarily on the al- Balid timbers, to describe the forms of nailed-plank technology in the medieval Indian Ocean, identifying three different techniques. These are contextualized within the broader Indian Ocean to provide insights into the origin of these nailed vessels, while discussing which boatbuilding traditions might have influenced the use of nails in the western Indian Ocean. Lastly, this paper argues that the introduction of metal fastenings is a com- plex topic that cannot be expressed in terms of simplistic absolutes and assump- tions found in the early scholarship, and that nailed vessels were probably more common than previously assumed.