I. Boikina
The Museum of the World Ocean, Kaliningrad, Russia

PRESERVATION EXPERIENCE OF THE ARCHEOLOGICAL FINDING
«SHIP OF THE XIX CENTURY»

In March, 2002, during works on ground layer removal in the amber sandpit «Primorsky» workers of the Kaliningrad Amber Plant found the remains of a wooden ship. Excavations were made. A lower part of the ship’s hull below a waterline was found. Probably, the ship was wrecked in shallow water and sank because of colliding with sea bottom.
The ship sailed along the Baltic shores and was a local type of medium coasters such as sumac, tialk, herren-yacht, aak, German galleass or lomme and other types of ships which go back to Dutch and German yachts of XVIII century. It is one-mast (or mast-and-a-half mast), one-deck and flat-bottomed ship, it was used for cargo and tourists transportation and fishing. Presumably it was equipped with gaff rig.
Length — 22—24 m
Width — ~ 8 m
Board height — ~3 m
Tonnage — 60—140 t
Built time: first third of XIX c.
Wreck time: second part of XIX c.
Restoration of a bigger part of metal findings and small wooden details with a rope fragment was made according to traditional methods. It took three years to conserve wooden fragments with polyethylene glycol solution PG-1500. The ship was assembled in 2006. In order to present interiors of the ship a relative reconstruction of a ship’s middle part was made.
There are no such big-sized monuments of a wooden shipbuilding of the XIX century in Russia; they can hardly be found both in Russia and in Europe. Study and preservation of old ship remains take a lot of money and time. These reasons raise value of a finding.