Abstract. The subject of the author's research is the peasant boats that existed and exist on the inland waterways and lake basins of Russia. It is proposed to understand the «national boat building» as the production and use of various types of local boats in the personal peasant economy.

People's boats are still poorly studied, which is due to the lack of developed research methods, common approaches to collecting information, measuring and describing boats. In many local centers, there are still masters who preserve the local traditions of boat building, the history of their origin and development, which is confirmed by the materials of the author's field research, finds of documents and photographs. In this article, the author offers a method of boat research that has been tested in 25 expeditions.