Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “ballast”
A new book from archaeologist Mats Burström of Stockholm University has just been published in both Swedish and English on Nordic Academic Press. Research presented in the book shows the fascinating afterlife of material such as sand, gravel, stone or rubble, used until very recently to give ships stability. In this richly illustrated book, Mats Burström charts how ballast has …
Solid material used as ballast in sailing ships has been re-used in many various ways, the re-use as ballast being the most obvious. Another re-use is as building material. A prominent example of where ballast stones have been utilized in this way is Savannah, Georgia, in the southeast of the United States. Savannah was established as a British settlement in …
One of the sites in the ongoing study of ballast is the small island Little Norway (Sw. Lilla Norge) in the river Ångermanälven in the northern part of Sweden. The island got its somewhat peculiar name from the many Norwegian ships that dumped their ballast at a certain point in the river. During the second half of the 19th century …
Along the shores in Newfoundland there is an abundance of flint to be found although this material does not occur naturally in the area. The reason for the presence of flint is that it was used as ballast by sailing vessels in the transatlantic migratory fishery that started in the beginning of the sixteenth century and lasted for about four …