Episode: 4447
Title: HPR4447: Interview with Margreet Pakkert at the Flevoland 2025 Field Work Archaeology Open Day.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4447/hpr4447.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:47:08

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4447 for Tuesday the 19th of August 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Interview with Margaret Packert at the Flevel in 2025
Field Work Archaeology Open Day.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, the shipwreck is a Dutch water skip with two chamber
to keep fish alive until reaching port.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I am here talking to...
...Raflet Packerts.
I'm a great.
You're standing in a portic cabin in the middle of a field, literally on the water.
Where are we and why are we here?
We are in Flevelands.
We are at an archeological excavation and we are excavating a shipwreck.
So, Fleveland, for people who don't know, is in Holland, better known as Nederland,
better known as the Lowlands.
And as my geography teacher used to tell me, God may have met the world, but the Dutch met Holland.
So, this was where we're standing now, literally, was the Zouder-Zay.
The Zouder-Zay was a Zay right in the middle of the Netherlands.
It was Brackish, which means part sweet, part salt, somewhere in the middle.
And mostly, there were fishing vessels.
There was also trade and the VOC worked there.
It's just a lot of shipping traffic.
And the VOC is the Dutch East India company.
So, you had this ships come from around the Amsterdam area.
Harder bike went out via the Zouder-Zay, up the north of Holland and out.
But you're still in the port of heaven on the water.
What happened?
Why are we dry here?
Well, at some point, during the 20th century, the Netherlands decided they needed more land.
So, they took part of the Zouder-Zay and they made it dry.
They made Flevelands, which is a new province.
It's about, I think, 60, 70, 80 years old now.
It depends on which part of the province you're standing in.
And it was basically made as an extension of Amsterdam and to make more farmland.
But that means that all the shipwrecks that were once at the Zouder-Zay are now on dry land.
There's a ship right here outside in the middle of what is farmland or...
It's a forest.
So, there's quite a small forest here.
It's just a bit of woodland right outside of this.
There's farmland.
So, when they drained the land, they pumped out the water,
and all of a sudden we started finding all these ships that were sunk.
What makes this one special?
Well, first of all, because the ship type is very interesting.
It's an avatarship.
It's a very important fishing vessel.
It was able to transport fish life alive.
So, the ship, the fish was fresh when it came to shore and was sold.
Secondly, because the groundwater levels here are lowering.
So, more of the ship that is underground is not covered in water anymore.
The parts that are not covered in water will degrade.
So, we're basically saving the ship from further degradation by documenting it,
which is what excavating is.
And thirdly, because we have a lot of students here in the Netherlands
who would like to learn maritime archaeology.
And learning it on land is a very good first step.
So, this is also a good way for a lot of students to be able to learn all the ship parts
and how to excavate and how to handle wood and fines and all that sort of stuff.
Wow, there's a no-flood in there.
So, I'm going to go back step one.
So, this was a boat that before we had refrigeration or anything like that,
this fisherman will go out and normally we'd sold the fish when he called them
and that left a taste.
But these guys through call the fish and dump them into basically a tank
at the bottom of the ship itself.
Okay, I got that right in the middle of the ship.
That presents some engineering challenges, I imagine.
How common are these water ships in the Netherlands?
There's about 40 known right now.
They were only in the Netherlands and only in the South of J.
So, it's a very rare ship type, actually.
We have excavated around 40-ish.
We have done some excavation, not a full excavation, but some.
So, this is not only common.
No, okay.
You're going to preserve this digitally you were saying.
So, can you tell us a bit about that process?
Yeah, so we use several different kinds of scans here.
We have been working on a ship for four years and every single year,
we have taken a photogrammetry scan, which means we use the drone to fly over the ship
and take a lot of pictures.
And a computer program takes those pictures and makes it into a 3D model,
which means that we have four 3D models that are visible online,
that show how what our progress was at the end of every year that we excavated here.
Then we have another scan that we did for the first time this year.
It was a LiDAR scan of the shipwreck, which is also a 3D scan,
but maybe with a little more detail.
And for all the separate parts of the shipwreck that we took out,
we make a very detailed scan with an R-tec scanner, which is a handheld scanner
that also uses many pictures and a little bit of laser to
make a 3D model.
Again, we use that 3D model as basically our end product of what we do with that wood.
So it's basically just a digital copy of the wood.
We also draw in it to present the details and then we don't really need the real wood anymore.
It would be great to have the real wood.
There's just money restrictions and space restrictions.
Would you not make it available for people to buy, to fund further,
can't serve your tree work?
I don't think that would be ethically bright.
Who pays for all of this?
The government and also the province.
And how did you get involved in archaeology?
I was looking around for studies and I liked this one so I started studying it.
I had no real previous interest in any of it.
But when I got to this field school my first year I went here.
I fell in love with maritime archaeology and now I've been here for another two years.
So it's good. It's a good field school.
So you mentioned just in passing that it's good for people to do that on dry land.
What do you mean by that?
Is most of your research then done on the water?
Yeah, most of maritime research is done on the water or through 3D scans that we do from a boat.
But you need a lot of diving experience and certain certifications.
And it's just good to learn the beginnings of it on land,
which is where most archaeologists start their studies anyway.
Or I've got to ask, do we know the name of the ship?
We do not. We have no name.
There's still a small chance that it's on the outside of the ship,
which we haven't seen yet, but I don't think there will be a name.
And there's no records of on this day year of our Lord Baba,
or this type of ship is so common that a loss wouldn't be recorded.
No, it's not that. It's that for paper documentation,
this is early 16th century ship.
There isn't a lot of paper documentation,
but any of this about shipping.
So you're not often going to find a name for it,
even for bigger ships you won't really find a name.
It really has to be an event where the ship actually sank
and being a newspaper, it's really hard to find names of ships.
It's very rare.
So ship loss was just a regular and official occurrence?
I'm not too knowledgeable about this,
but I'm going to say it probably would be worth a death notice maybe,
but writing an article in a paper costs money.
So it depends.
You have some models here. Can you tell me what these are?
And then I'm going to wrap this interview up.
But if you want to basically describe this for the listening audience,
very important, I will have pictures in the show notes just by the way.
So in the first year, we excavated here.
We excavated only the back part of the ship,
which means it's really just a mess in that we call it a Mikado,
which is a children's game.
I don't know if that's a published thing as well.
So we call it Mikado because all the planks and beams and all the other elements of the ship,
they kind of fell down and fell over each other and it just fell apart.
In the back of the ship as well, it fell apart.
So usually you have the ship and both sides are standing up.
In our ship wreck, both sides are laying down and it kind of fell apart
towards the really back part of the ship.
Yeah, more than likely if you say a dot word about a ship,
it's going to be the same word in English.
Just a top tip.
Yeah, there's different elements.
There's also a Brad spill in there, which was used to roll up ropes usually,
maybe for an anchor or for a fishing net.
We don't know it fell down.
And then the year after we excavated also the front of the ship,
where we could see more of the construction in length of the ship
for security of the ship so it doesn't fall apart.
Also held together the internal construction yet.
Exactly that.
And there wouldn't be planks are overlaid over each other and then in between the
held together with trusses.
Yes, yeah, okay.
Just filling in for what I'm looking at here.
And I guess that's when this being here that you have
that held up the mast was found.
So it's right down here.
It's you can see it in this one.
It's in the middle of the ship.
Seemed from starboard's quartz side.
It's in the middle of the ship and then it's in the front side of the ship.
Right in front of the life well.
Oh yeah, that's it there.
That's it back at the back.
Okay, yeah, a lot further back than I would have thought.
Yeah.
But now makes more sense now that we've seen photos of where the sail was.
Okay, good.
Exactly.
So the sail was in the front of the ship.
It helps with steering and with pulling.
The ship was very much meant to be pulling.
So the front of the ship was also more in a round shape
and the back ship in more in a sharp shape
to help that function.
In the middle of the ship we have the life well.
It's divided in two compartments and that's where the fish were kept.
That's where the fish were kept.
And they were in like brine water as well.
Just the same was was there a hole between the outside and the inside or?
So there are very many tiny little holes in the outside of the ship
in the hole in a location of the life well.
So the water that the ship was sailing in could just come into the ship
in that compartment so it's continuous fresh water streaming water
to keep the fish alive for oxygen and everything else.
I needless to say that those were separate from the rest of the ship I imagine
or as a sink.
Yeah, otherwise you don't have a ship, you have a ship wreck.
Well, speaking of which, do we know what happened?
Does it become a ship wreck?
No, we don't.
There's no obvious cannonball size hole on the side or anything.
Go on, say that's long.
I've pulled marks or that would be really cool.
No, we don't.
There's a theory about maybe something else sailed into the back of the ship.
Yeah, rammed it and that's maybe why it fell apart.
Although that's a common occurrence in shipwrecks that the back of it falls apart
or the front of it falls apart.
Yeah, I'm trying to fast storm.
Yeah, they could have been the storm.
So it could have been that that damage occurred to the collision
or during the as it sank.
How deep would it have been back in the day?
The water.
Yeah.
Oh, funnily enough about as high as the top of the life.
Well, so I don't know exactly measurements,
but I think about two or three meters.
So it's a location where it's sad.
Yeah, yeah, which is pretty close to sure.
So it's quite likely the sailors just swam home
or was swimming a thing that we did back then.
I don't actually know.
It depends on the sailor, I think.
And if there was a storm, it's kind of like...
I'll tell you what, for the sake of this narrative,
everybody's got home safe and we all learned a valuable lesson
about buildings spending more attention to go out and windy weather.
Look, this has been fantastic.
It's been super interesting seeing all the buildings,
all the construction work here and stuff.
And thank you very much for your time.
Well, thank you, too.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listening like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts,
you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by
an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our syncs.net.
On the Sadois stages, today's show is released
under Creative Commons' Attribution 4.0 International License.
