Internat J Naut Archaeol 32 (2)

The distribution of Dressel 1 amphoras and Gallo-Roman ceramics in and around the Isle of Wight is examined, including material from the floor and margins of the Solent seaway. The authors suggest that the islanders of the Iron Age were accomplished seafarers, active in cross-Channel trade. The creeks of the island provided natural havens for these activities while the eastern Solent seems to have offered a great sheltered anchorage in an important strategic position. This is equated with the Magnus Portus mentioned by the second-century geographer Ptolemy. The authors consider that submerged artefact scatters and ancient anchorages are aspects of the European coastline which are in particular need of archaeological evaluation and protection.

Archaeological fieldwork in 1997 on the Isle of Dogs, at the south-east entrance to the West India Docks, recovered evidence of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century shipyards, associated activities and foreign trade. Reused timbers may be the remains of the seventeenth-century Rolt's yard. Reclamation along the natural inlet was accompanied by the construction of a timber dry dock probably in the late eighteenth century. This soon fell out of use and was filled in with the construction of new dry docks to the south in 1806 by Thomas Pitcher. Much of the debris dating to the first half of the nineteenth century from ship repairing and building and from a range of ancillary crafts, together with ceramics from Iberia and the Far East, probably came from Pitcher's yard.

The paper discusses the application of a number of manual trilateration surveying systems, an acoustic surveying system and a photogrammetric system applied to a rigid test frame. Results and relative merits are compared and discussed.