Author: Mick de Ruyter
de Ruyter, Mick, 2021 The Fighting Dhow: Early modern vernacular watercraft and organised maritime violence in the Persian Gulf, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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This thesis presents an original contribution to knowledge by identifying architectural signatures of violence in watercraft, and their potential archaeological remains, through analysis of visual sources. The coast-dwelling people of the early modern Persian Gulf used traditional watercraft for fishing, pearling, transport and fighting. Their boats and ships, now known as dhows, represented both their most valuable assets and their most significant technology. The European intrusion in the Gulf from the sixteenth century drove technological and organisational change in coastal societies that had to adapt to new ways of fighting with watercraft. The analysis of an extensive corpus of over 400 mostly little-used or unpublished visual sources shows how these changes left architectural traits in later Gulf watercraft. The results demonstrate that vernacular fighting craft of peripheral maritime societies like those of the Gulf offer unique insights into the ways people modify their everyday things in response to violence.
Keywords: dhows, nautical archaeology, Arabian / Persian Gulf seafaring, Arab piracy
Subject: Archaeology thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2021
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: A/Prof Wendy van Duivenvoorde