The Galilee Boat—2,000-Year-Old Hull Recovered Intact - The BAS Library
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The Galilee Boat—2,000-Year-Old Hull Recovered Intact

By Shelley Wachsmann

A severe drought gripped Israel in 1985 and 1986. The winter rains barely came. Water was pumped from the Sea of Galilee to irrigate parched fields throughout the country. Predictably, the Kinneret (the Hebrew name of the freshwater inland lake also known as the Sea of Galilee) shrank. Wide expanses of lakebed, normally covered with water, were exposed. Moshe and Yuval Lufan live with their families on Kibbutz Ginnosar on the northwest shore of the lake. Avid amateur archaeologists, Moshe and Yuval frequently explored the newly exposed lakebed for ancient remains. In January 1986 they were examining an area […]

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Footnotes

1.

For an explanation of the carbon-14 method of dating, see the box above.

2.

However, the carbon-14 test tells us when the wood was cut. Some of the wood on this boat may have been reused from hulls of earlier boats.

3.

See “Gamla: The Masada of the North,” BAR 05:01 and Flavius Josephus, “The Fall of Gamla,” BAR 05:01.