Clay Pipes and Smoking Paraphernalia from the Kitten Shipwreck, an Early Nineteenth-Century Black Sea Merchantman
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Clay Pipes and Smoking Paraphernalia from the Kitten Shipwreck, an Early Nineteenth-Century Black Sea Merchantman Kroum N. Batchvarov
Published online: 17 December 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Between 2000 and 2003, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in collaboration with the Bulgarian Centre for Underwater Archaeology excavated the remains of an Ottoman period shipwreck in the southern bay of the town of Kitten, Bulgaria, dating to the reign of Sultan Selim III (1789–1807). This article discusses the smoking pipes and paraphernalia found on the wreck. The studied material offers a refinement to the dating of Ottoman pipes and proposes a reading of Ottoman pipe stamps from the Balkans that were hitherto considered undecipherable. Keywords Ottoman . Pipes . Shipwreck . Black Sea
Introduction In the early 1980s Bulgarian archaeologists of the newly established Centre for Underwater Archaeology at Sozopol, discovered the remains of a post-medieval ship in the southern Bay of Kitten, below Cape Urdoviza (Fig. 1). The largest single group of artifacts recovered from the shipwreck was a collection of clay smoking pipes (Porozhanov 2000, pp. 92–96). In 2000 a joint Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA)–Centre for Underwater Archaeology (CUA) team returned to the wreck to inaugurate the first complete archaeological excavation and recording of a postmedieval shipwreck in the Black Sea. The ship is well preserved with at least 40 % of the hull surviving (Fig. 2) Based on the reconstruction, it was originally at least 23 m long by 7.5 m beam and displaced about 160 t fully laden (Batchvarov 2009, p. 103–158). The vessel was constructed in a whole-molding tradition that was abandoned in the Mediterranean outside of Ottoman waters by the early years of the eighteenth century (Batchvarov 2011, 2012). Enough of the vessel’s structure survived to demonstrate the K. N. Batchvarov (*) Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Groton, CT 06340, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2014) 18:1–19
Fig. 1 Location of Kitten site and other underwater archaeological sites along the Bulgarian coast (Drawing: M. Georgiev)
internal architecture of the vessel. In the stern were discovered the remains of the cabin sole, a tiny trapezoidal space of 1.4 m length by 1.4 m in breadth at the forward end, tapering to 1 m at the aft end. The entrance to the cabin was on the starboard side. No evidence of internal space division (bulkheads) was found further forward; therefore, the cabin must have opened directly into the hold of the vessel. At the time of sinking, the ship was not carrying any cargo and may have come to the bay for loading when disaster struck. The majority of artifacts were discovered in the stern cabin of the vessel. Off the
Int J Histor Archaeol (2014) 18:1–19
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Fig. 2 Site plan of the Kitten Shipwreck. (Drawing K. Batchvarov)
port bow of the vessel, were discovered a few personal items (a small wicker box with a comb and a brass earring), rem
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