The Dover Bronze Age Boat Gallery

The new 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.