16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

92 16 th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology Hélène Botcazou Aix-Marseille University, Ipso Facto, France Boats of Corsica: a study of several maritime Ex-Voto Located at the very heart of the Western Mediterranean, Corsica island is well integrated into the maritime network routes. Very active harbours and ports are originally genovese citadels more open toward the sea than the mountains in- land. We know little about the ships sailing along those shores. Their waters are generally too shallow and the bays too narrow to allow ships of significant ton- nage to approach. We set aside the modest but useful latini , gondole , scafi , schivi , barcelle , vilucce , saette , corazelli , piatte , gozzi , bovi . Nowadays few exemplaries of the traditi “felouque” from Bonifacio are surviving, all made by the shipyards of Ajaccio. The last one closed 40 years ago. In this article we will present some of this coasters and little fishing boats sailing in Corsican waters between the 19 th and the 20 th centuries. We aim to present a new typology of this boats known from historical and iconographical sources in order to describe their character- istics and identify the adaptations to the Corsican environment and to the local societies that built them. We will rely on new iconographical sources of the mar- itime Ex-Voto preserved in the island’s chapels, and examinated during a 2018 survey. A Maritime Ex-voto (coming from the latin Ex Voto Suscepto ) can be a painting, or an object in relation to a maritime event, given to a sanctuary as a reward to God or a Saint. The donor generally survived to a misfortune or an accident. He depicts it and sometimes describes the events in a dedication. The paintings can be a great source of information for the architectural details of the ship, the maritime routes, or the emergency procedures followed during extreme weather conditions. This study was carried out within the research framework of the au- thor’s recently defended PhD, with the collaboration of the LA3M laboratory (Aix-Marseille University, France) and the IPSO FACTO Company. This work was co-directed by Nicolas Faucherre (CNRS-AMU) and Eric Rieth (CNRS, Paris 1 Pan- théon-Sorbonne).