Shipbuilders of medieval Malabar

Natural History, Dec, 2004 by T.J. Kelleher

Since antiquity, mariners have sailed the Indian Ocean and dropped anchor along the southwest coast of Malabar, now the southern Indian state of Kerala, to buy pepper, cardamom, and timber. Archaeologists have long assumed that few of their boats would have survived the depredations of time, climate, invertebrates, and microorganisms.

But such expectations may have been unduly pessimistic. Not long ago, while digging up a field, villagers in Kerala made the unprecedented discovery of a seventy-foot timber boat, whose wood has now been dated to sometime between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. Perhaps even more intriguing--according to Victoria Tomalin of the University of Southampton in England, V. Selvakumar of the Centre for Heritage Studies in Tripunithura, Kerala, and the other archaeologists excavating the boat--is what the relic implies about late medieval shipbuilding techniques in southern India.

The Kerala boat has a flat bottom and a boxlike stern, as did many Chinese boats of the period. It also has iron fastenings, even though the shipbuilders of medieval South Asia reputedly used no iron; indeed, an eleventh-century Indian treatise advises that the metal be avoided lest magnetic rocks drag a boat to its doom. And the points of some of the iron nails have been flattened in a way characteristic of northern European shipbuilding. Altogether, the craft displays a "boatman's stew" of technologies.

Now that this boat has been discovered, surprisingly well preserved by having been permanently waterlogged and covered in silt, it may be safe to conjecture that other centuries-old boats may be lying in the sediment-filled backwaters of Kerala, silently awaiting excavation. ("The Thaikkal-Kadakkarappally boat: An archaeological example of medieval shipbuilding in the western Indian Ocean," International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 33:253-63, October 2004)