The timbers of the Ship, as recovered, were not as they appear lying in the storage rooms cleaned, preserved and awaiting reassembly. The first task that the team had was to clean all of the ship timbers. The timbers were covered with clay, tar, mud and caulking. When taken from the Usk river the timbers were covered in varying amounts of mud and concretion, a hard packed layer of iron caused by the environmental conditions of the Usk estuary meaning that the ship would need to be thoroughly cleaned before any recording could take place.
Cleaning and Recording the ship
A member of the conservation team cleans timbers
Each timber had to be carefully cleaned, beginning with just clean tap water to remove the largest debris and moving on to using soft toothbrushes and dental tools in the final stages to avoid damage to the fragile timbers, all while having to keep the wood wet to prevent it distorting from drying too quickly.
Cleaning the timbers was a very messy job and had to be carried outcarefully to allow the archaeologists the opportunity to study the surface of the timbers for evidence relating to the ship’s construction and use. The task took several years and included the help of many conservation students and volunteers.
A member of the conservation team cleans timbers
The Newport Ship was one of the first marine archaeology projects to pioneer the use of FARO equipment and RHINO software to produce 3-dimensional rotatable images of each ship timber and each artifact found within the vessel with sub-millimetre precision.
The Newport Ship Project relied on a variety of digital recording methodologies to document the structural ship timbers. The digital output of these methods, in the form of vector graphic drawing files, created a data set from which to construct digital and physical models. While we were able to document the position and context of artefacts and ship timbers with multiple traditional hand drawings, photogrammetry, photography and videography, these methods were unable to record each timber in the detail necessary to create a reconstruction model of the ship.
The Newport Ship’s Curator, Toby Jones, using a FaroArm to record a ship timber into the computer.
In terms of archaeology, it was ground-breaking; this technology had been previously used to help engineers build jet engines and airplane wings. A grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund was used to purchase four digitisers. The archaeologists were able to trace over important features of the timbers with the tip of the recording arm and produce a very accurate 3D image of the recorded object. The record for each object is produced in layers, with each layer capturing specific information like tool marks, where the nails are located, blemishes, damage, previously unsuspected “builders marks” as well as merchant’s identity marks on some barrel staves. . The entire extant hull of the ship was cleaned and comprehensively recorded in three years.
FaroArm being used to record a ship timber into the computer.
The Ship Model
Thanks to the FaroArm and the 3d models it creates this has allowed the Newport Ship Project to take full advantage of 21st Century technologies to help bring the ship to life this includes a fully accurate 1:10 scale model of the Newport Ship 3d printed by Cardiff University using the data provided by the project. Not only is it visually impressive but it also helps the project team have a better idea of how the ship was originally constructed, as they had to build the ship in miniature in the same order as the original shipwrights, but it also provides a blueprint of how to reassemble the ship later on down the road.
You can see below a video produced for us by the Arts & Humanities Research Council on the Recording and Conservation efforts made by the Newport Ship Project on its 10th Anniversary as well as the ship model itself.
A number of other videos about the ship and its history are available. These are just a few.
The Newport Medieval Ship in Context