JP Brown, Nicole Schmidt, Mackenzie Fairchild, Kaitlyn Wright, and Jasmine Eleck
Abstract
Late nineteenth century excavations at the pyramid complex of Senusret III (d.c. 1839 BCE) in Dahshur, Egypt, discovered, among other finds, a series of full-sized wooden boats in a remarkably good state of preservation. Four of the boats were recovered from the excavation, reassembled in Egypt using late c.19th structural techniques (iron alloy straps screwed to original timbers, replacement wood nailed into original timbers with 4-½” 30d nails), and moved to museums – two boats remained in Egypt and are currently at the Sharm el-Sheikh Museum, while the other two were shipped by sea to the Field Museum, Chicago, IL and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, PA.
The Chicago boat is 32 feet long, 8 feet wide, and contains a little over a ton of original Bronze Age cedar timbers up to 15 feet long and 180 lb in weight, held together with late nineteenth century wood, steel framework, and metal fasteners. The boat has been on display on the ground floor of the Field Museum since the building was constructed in the early 1920s, latterly in a humidity-controlled display case. The construction of a new permanent exhibit requires the boat to be moved from the ground floor to the first floor of the museum, and the only way that the boat could be moved to its new location was to disassemble it. The disassembly presented an unusually large-scale and complex challenge for objects conservators: most of the original timbers were large and heavy, the nineteenth century metal supports and fasteners had corroded in place, and the removal of the structural support required the manufacture of a series of temporary props to support the timbers during disassembly. In addition, the need to complete the work while conditions in a gallery without humidity control were favorable for the timbers’ dimensional stability meant that the timeline for completion of the project was extremely short.
In this paper we report the documentation of the assembled boat, the reversal of the nineteenth century structural framework, the disassembly and documentation of its individual components (photogrammetry of the overall boat; photography, schematic diagraming, 3D laser and structured light scanning, x-radiography, multiband photogrammetry, and dendrochronological sampling of the individual timbers), and the construction of a humidity-controlled bubble to store the timbers, all executed over a four month period from June through September, 2025. We finish with our treatment so far – filling the fastener holes and reducing the iron staining from the corroding structural elements, together with some considerations on using the 3D scans to design and build a new mount for the boat.