Bronze Age Boat Gallery
The gallery explains all about the
boat and looks at the Bronze Age in Dover and Britain.
The gallery includes :
- the Dover Bronze Age Boat as the centre-piece
- a mixture of original Bronze Age artefacts
with models and replicas
- traditional display cases and information panels
- multimedia exhibits, hands-on puzzles and
interactive models, including a chance for you to
practice your Bronze Age boat-building skills of completing a 'yew'
stitch
- a full scale sectional model through a Bronze Age
hut, showing how the people would have lived
Other parts of the gallery are an
audio-visual theatre showing a short film on the
excavation of the boat and a Laboratory, where
microscopic evidence from the boat excavation can be viewed using
microscopes.
The gallery is arranged into
themes
- Ritual and Belief -
how archaeological evidence tells us about the ritual and belief of
Bronze Age people - how they treated their dead, the monuments they
built, about objects they made as offerings.
- Living - the Bronze Age
house - the clothes Bronze Age people wore, the houses
they lived in, what they ate - shown in a wonderful life-size
reconstruction of part of a Bronze Age house and its
inhabitants
- Bronze Age
technology - the materials and skills used in the
Bronze Age, and the artefacts that remain for us to study - for
instance pottery, stone, metal, cloth, wood, and the landscape
- Building the Boat -
how the Bronze Age Boat was built using the available materials and
technology, based around a modern experiment to reproduce a section
of the Bronze Age Boat
- Bronze Age Trade -
and the history of boats. What the original boat would have looked
like and what it could have been used for - cross-channel trading
and the Langdon Bay wreck.
- Science and
Archaeology - the techniques and technology used to
study the boat; environmental evidence and studying Bronze Age
Dover, the study and preservation of the boat since its
excavation.
Boat Gallery News
The Boat Gallery has recently been
Highly Recommended in the British Archaeological Awards Virgin
Holidays Award for presentation of an archaeological project.
The Dover Bronze Age Boat project received the ICI
Award 2000 for best archaeological project offering a major
contribution to knowledge. Congratulations go to all those involved
in the project, directed by Peter Clark, Canterbury Archaeological
Trust.