Search results for ""Author Sean McGrail""

Early Ships and Seafaring: Water Transport Within Europe builds on Professor Sen McGrails 2006 volume Ancient Boats and Ships by delving deeper into the construction and use of boats and ships between the stone age and AD1500 in order to provide up to date information. Regions covered will include the Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe. This interesting volume is easily accessible to those with little or no knowledge of the building and uses of boats, whether ancient or modern.Sen McGrail introduces the reader to this relatively new discipline through the theory and techniques used in the study of early boats as well as the many different types of evidence available to us, including archaeological, documentary, iconographic, experimental and ethnographic, and the natural, physical laws.

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In this book, Professor McGrail's study of European water transport is extended to Egypt, Arabia, India, South-east Asia, China, Australia, Oceania and the Americas. Each chapter presents a picture of ancient boatbuilding and seafaring that is as accurate and as comprehensive as it is now possible to achieve. The early rafts and boats of those regions were, as in Europe, hand-built from natural materials and were propelled and steered by human muscle or wind power. This volume ranges in time from the Prehistoric period to today when a number of such traditional craft continue to be built. In Egypt, not only have accounts, models and illustrations of ancient rafts and boats survived, but also a number of early vessels have been excavated some dated as early as the 3rd Millennium BC. In regions such as the Americas, on the other hand, where few ancient craft have been excavated, we are able to draw on accounts and illustrations compiled, from the 16th century AD onwards, by European seamen and explorers. In most regions of the world a variety of water transport has been built, limited only by the raw materials available. On the island of Tasmania, however, an early rise in sea levels cut contacts with Australia, leaving Tasmanians with simple types of Stone Age water transport that survived in use until Europeans discovered them. Worldwide, much remains to be learnt about early water transport by excavation, and by ethnographic studies of those traditional rafts and boats that have survived.

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