The Indigenous Watercraft of Northern Eurasia

Abstract

Hear we overview the indigenous watercraft from northern Europe to Bering Strait and the Far East. Our purpose has been to document the types of boats, their history, and how they were made and used by the cultures of this vast region. Data have been gleaned from diverse sources, including archaeological finds, ethnographic descriptions, museum collections, photographs, historical documents, and reports of early trans-Siberian travelers. Because of space limitations, the summary provided here is devoted to bark boat traditions, with limited discussion of skin boats because the latter are better known in existing literature. Our work has been facilitated by Valentina V. Antropova, whose 1961 survey of Soviet/Russian watercraft guided much of our work. We describe four major canoe traditions, each coinciding with major river systems: Ob-Pechora, Yenesei, Lena, and Amur. Within each river system there may be several sub-types, e. g. Amur I and Amur II. Except in rock art, the history of bark boat development is very shallow as very few bark canoes have been preserved archaeologically. Paddles, however, indicate the presence of bark canoes as early as 8000 years ago. Some rock art depicts log canoes rather than bark or skin boats. Wooden planked boats replaced bark canoes in northwestern Eurasia during the late Iron Age but persisted in the Amur into the 20th century. Canoes appear to have dispersed from South Siberia during the early Holocene and developed distinctive features in their respective river systems. Some Ket Yenesei canoe styles may be prototypes of Kootenai Indian canoes of interior British Columbia.