The dhow’s last redoubt? Vestiges of wooden boatbuilding traditions in Yemen

Abstract

Researchers from the MARES Project visited Yemen in February 2009 in order to investigate the building and use of traditional wooden boats (‘dhows’, in English parlance) in the country. The survey covered the coastline from Aden to Salif in the Red Sea, and visited centres of traditional dhow building and use, including Ghureira, Mocha and Khokha. The project aimed to assess the state of the industry, establish a vessel typology, understand construction processes, learn about the use of these vessels, and compile a lexicon of boatbuilding and nautical terms. This article offers the preliminary findings of the survey, pending more comprehensive publication in the future. The survey found that, in all locations visited, the building of new vessels had rapidly diminished in the preceding decade, and had now all but ceased. The only ongoing activity witnessed during the survey was repairs to existing wooden craft. In formerly large boat-building centres, wooden boat-builders, mostly elderly, have ceased work, while younger men were building fishing craft using fibreglass – the material used in the great majority of vessels in Yemen today. A preliminary typology of surviving vessel was established. The doubleended cargo-carrying za<īmahs and zārūqs were recorded only as 2 abandoned hulks. Double-ended

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.