Tom Vosmer’s original research on Musandam battil and his studies of boat typology and the evolution of boat types in the Western Indian Ocean more broadly speaking can be found in his “Omani Seafaring and Omani Boats,” in Oman and Overseas, edited by Michaela Hofmann-Ruf and Abdulrahman al-Salimi, pp. 65–76 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013); “Indigenous Fishing Vessels of the Sultanate of Oman.” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 26 (1997): 217–235; and (with Alessandro Ghidoni), “Boats and Ships of the Arabian Gulf and the Sea of Oman within an Archaeological, Historical, and Ethnographic Context,” in The Arabian Seas: Biodiversity, Environmental Challenges and Conservation Efforts, edited by A.L. Jawad, pp. 957–989 (Basel: Springer Nature, 2021).
For more on “sewn” ship construction of the Indian Ocean, see the recent article by Vosmer’s collaborator Alessandro Ghidoni, “Sewn-plank construction techniques from the Western Indian Ocean: the evidence from the timbers at Al Baleed, Oman,” Archaeonautica 21 (2021), 225–232. https://journals.openedition.org/archaeonautica/1574?lang=en
For the ethnographic work on boatbuilding and seafaring along the Arabian seaboards, including interviews with battil users, see Dionisius Agius, In the Wake of the Dhow: The Arabian Gulf and Oman (Ithaca Press, 2002). Also indispensable is the study combining medieval textual accounts of seafaring and boatbuilding with ethnographic data in his encyclopaedic Classic Ships of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
The images of large decorated battil by Wilfred Thesiger appear in a volume entitled Oman, A Seafaring Nation (Muscat: Ministry of Information, 1980) that still provides an accessible overview of shipping and boatbuilding in the country through the ages. On European interest in shells and cowrie shells in particular, a wonderful place to start is the recent volume entitled Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
I’m very grateful to Tom Vosmer, who read and commented on a draft of this post, and thank him as well as Roger Garwood for allowing us to post the images. Any mistakes that remain here are, of course, my own!