Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant
Shelley Wachsmann
(College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 1998) 417 pp., $80.00
In 1986, as Inspector of Underwater Antiquities for the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (now the Israel Antiquities Authority), Shelly Wachsmann excavated one of the most exciting finds of the 20th century: the “Jesus Boat,” an intact 2,000-year-old boat buried in the muck of the Sea of Galilee. His riveting account of this excavation, The Sea of Galilee Boat (New York: Plenum, 1995), won a 1997 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award. Wachsmann is the Meadows Assistant Professor of Biblical Archaeology at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Texas A&M University, where he is hard at work on a mystery novel with and archaeological twist.