The paper is based on an ethnographic investigation of building wooden boats in West Bengal. A team of eight to ten men works together for four to six months to make boats some 60 feet in length that are used for trips of up to twelve days in the Bay of Bengal. The men work together in what seems like a choreographed series of movements, largely without exchange of words. The tools in use are simple. The actors are functionally "illiterate", with minimal formal schooling. The skills and ideas are distributed within and among the members of the group. There is no evidence of recorded drawings, plans, formulae, or indeed book-keeping. Everything is transmitted orally and enactively. How is it possible that the resulting boats are exceptionally functional and strong, used for extended oceanic travel? What kind of embodied concepts do the workers develop and maintain? Moreover, the process of construction is not static. Rather than exact reproduction of techniques of construction, the builders’ success depends on problem solving around novel tasks and on adaptive use of tools and materials. How do they cope with and agentively initiate change? These are the questions addressed in the paper.