16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

78 16 th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology Petr Sorokin Institute of history of material culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia Cargo ship from Lake Onega and the Late Medieval shipbuilding tradition in Northern Russia The wooden shipwreck was discovered on the southern coast of Lake Onega in 2018. The ship’s bottom, eight floor timbers, and part of a side are well preserved. The flat bottom, made up of five boards up to 23 cm thick, had length 20.6 m, width 1.7 m. The largest frame was 5.8 m long. Part of the side had seven planks up to 6 cm thick, with dimensions of 11.4 x 1.05 m. The planks of the bottom were connected with wooden nails and iron bars, and the sides in clinker in the technique of sewing with the help of vitsa. The sealing of the seams i.e. caulking strakes was done with moss, fixed with laths and iron sintels. The reconstructed dimensions of the ship are about 22 m in length and up to 7 m width. The height of it reached over 1.5 m. According to the dendrochronological analysis of wood, the ship dates from the second quarter of the 17 th century (Zhavoronkov 2018). It belongs to the cargo ships used for lake and sea voyages. Judging by the size of the vessel, it can be interpreted as а Lodia . Parts of this type of ship have been found on the end of water way from Vologda to the White Sea. Some design features of the wreck have analogies among medieval boat details from Novgorod. Its location in the Baltic Sea basin shows that the ship could have been used, among other things, for trading operations in the Baltic Sea, known from written sources of the 17 th century. The Sewn boat from Stockholm (Skeepargatan), dating from the late 17 th – early 18 th century and interpreted as Russian, had also some technological similarities to the find from Lake Onega. The development of traditional North Russian shipbuilding in the Baltic and White Sea regions during the medieval peri- od becomes clearer as a result of the study of the shipwreck from Onega.