ships and shipbuilding: The Americas Wall painting of Ulysses and the Sirens, Roman, mid-first century c.e., from Pompeii, Italy; the ship, a war galley, is shown in considerable detail (© The Trustees of the British Museum) types, such as naves lapidariae, or the stone carriers, which transported hundreds of tons of marble and granite from virtually every quarry in the ancient world, to be sculpted into architectural elements (columns, friezes, and monuments), sarcophagi, statuary, and furniture To gain a better sense of the wide range of vessels that existed in the Roman world, one need only examine the late Roman ship mosaic from Althiburus, Tunisia, or consult the lexicon of ship types assembled by the grammarian and lexicographer Nonius Marcellus in the early fourth century c.e By the early seventh century c.e the shell-first ship construction technique of the Greeks and Romans had changed drastically, as evidenced by the shipwreck excavated at Yassi Ada, Turkey, in the early 1960s The shallow, widely spaced mortises and loosely fitting, unpegged tenons of this Byzantine cargo vessel no longer contributed the primary source of hull strength; they probably served only to keep the planks aligned long enough for them to be nailed to the ship’s frames THE AMERICAS BY LAWRENCE WALDRON The history of watercraft in the Americas harks back to the very first arrival of people in those continents As scholars continue to debate whether people during the ice age first arrived from Asia on foot or by boat, it is evident that the original settlers already possessed some knowledge of seafaring Watercraft and maritime navigation in and around the Ber- 983 ing Strait in the late ice age would have been used mostly for fishing in coastal waters Any seafaring skills would have had to adjust to many new environments once people had arrived in the Americas Varied American coastal conditions as well as reefs, rivers, rapids, lakes, swamps, and estuaries all presented unique restrictions and opportunities to early American boatmen Despite the numerous local innovations, ancient American watercraft can be grouped into four major types: skin boats (including kayaks, umiaks, and other bullboats), canoes, rafts, and reed boats Such watercraft served either as transportation between one seasonal habitat and another or as fishing or whaling vessels Watercraft were also used in trade expeditions between neighboring groups and between civilizations as far apart as Mexico and Peru Coastal and riverine voyages of exploration were made in search of new food sources and trading partners, but it appears that once in the Americas, ancient Indians were never again moved to cross to another continent and so never developed large oceangoing vessels Many ancient natives turned their attention not to developing sailing ships that might carry seamen beyond the horizon but to pioneering a wide variety of small, highly maneuverable watercraft The ancient Indians along the northwestern coast of Canada and the United States developed an unusual kind of boat In the absence of a steady supply of timber, the obvious choice of wooden boats was not available to far-northern and Arctic Indians These groups were already adept at making a series of aquatic devices out of sealskin and whale skin, including inflatable flotation devices and wetsuits that remained relatively warm and buoyant in the icy northern waters Before the Common Era, therefore, the idea of a skin boat had already occurred to them Made of skin stretched across a frame of wood, these boats proved to be lightweight and easily manageable in water that could sometimes be an obstacle course of floating ice chunks The Inuit, Aleuts, and other groups call these craft umiaks or kayaks depending on their design Seasonal movements enabled ancient northern Indians to maximize their food sources When it was time to move, they gathered their possessions and piled into large, round skin boats called umiaks These boats were probably paddled mostly by women, as they were in later times The male hunters would have traveled alongside the umiaks in smaller boats also made of skin These smaller, one-person craft were the kind later known as kayaks and were used in both fishing and the hunting of large marine mammals Made in a sleek, elongated shape that seemingly sliced through water, kayaks were made of skin stretched over even the top of the boat Only a small opening was left topside into which the rider could slip his lower body and sit comfortably In this way the kayak acted like an extension of the boater’s body, with only his upper torso visible as he whisked through the water, arms moving the paddle in a circular motion An ingenious aspect of the craft’s design was that it could eas-