A huge wooden anchor covered in sandbags by divers decades ago has turned out to be much older than experts thought

A 7-foot oak and lead anchor stock in Israel's Dor Lagoon weighed about 330 pounds. Scientists have now dated it to the late 7th or early 6th century BCE.

In 1995, divers in the Dor Lagoon on Israel's Carmel coast exposed the top of a long oak anchor stock set with lead, the heavy crossbar fitted across the top of an anchor's shank. The team left it where it lay, with the broken pottery around it, and covered the lot with sandbags.

The 1994 to 1995 project was a joint one between the University of Haifa and Texas A&M University. It dated the stock to the Persian period, which began in the 6th century BCE.

K. Johnson of the University of Haifa and four co-authors published a new study of it on October 20, 2026. They dated the stock with a ship's cargo from the late 7th or early 6th century BCE, about 2,600 years ago. They also work out how it was built, even without its lost shank and arms.

Sandbags in Tantura Lagoon

Tel Dor lies about 13 miles (21 kilometers) south of Haifa. Its southern bay is called both the Dor Lagoon and the Tantura Lagoon. Small islands on the west side make it a protected anchorage in seas up to Beaufort 4.

Divers have logged more than 25 shipwrecks there. The stock was lying in the sand of the lagoon floor.

Shelley Wachsmann, who worked on the 1990s expedition, published it in 1997 with co-author Kahanov. P. Sibella made the scaled drawing for their report, and 29 years later the new team used it to calculate the lead.

The 2023 and 2024 dives were a joint project of the University of Haifa and the University of California San Diego. Codirecting them were Assaf Yasur-Landau of Haifa and Thomas E. Levy of the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego.

Their divers started by uncovering the stock again. In 2023 a water dredge cleared about 33 by 20 feet (10 by 6 meters) of seabed. Another 30 by 13 feet (9 by 4 meters) followed in 2024, according to a 2025 report in Antiquity.

Eight slots and four lead cores

Roughly 85 percent of the oak beam is still there, 6.9 feet (2.1 meters) of it. Whole, it ran about 7.2 feet (2.2 meters), at 6.3 inches (16 centimeters) wide and 3.9 inches (10 centimeters) thick.

It is broken at the eastern end, where the snapped-off piece lies on a rock with two patches of lead showing. Chisel and adze marks show how the oak was shaped, including the cavities that hold four lead cores.

From the 3D models and a wood sample, each core works out to about 62 pounds (28.3 kilograms), assuming pure lead. That makes about 249 pounds (113 kilograms) of lead in all. The paper calls the 330-pound (150-kilogram) stock "the largest eastern Mediterranean wood and lead anchor stock found to date."

Eight little square holes open into the cores, four per long side. Each is just under an inch (2 to 2.4 centimeters) across. Lead that ran into them during casting hardened into bolts holding each core in place.

Anchors from the 4th century BCE on lack them, among them those of two merchant wrecks, Ma'agan Mikhael off Israel and Kyrenia off Cyprus. The authors suggest the slots weakened the wood and were given up. That would make the bolts a possible dating clue.

A cargo of raw iron

During the 2023 and 2024 seasons the stock turned up beside the main pile of pottery and iron. Sherds of basket-handled amphorae lay all around it.

That load was first reported in 2025. The anchor paper lists at least 15 basket-handled amphorae, four Phoenician-type amphorae and three thin-walled bowls, plus ballast stones.

Nine iron blooms were in the load too, raw lumps of iron and slag weighing about 154 pounds (69.75 kilograms) in all. A separate study of them, published earlier this year, described the oldest securely dated sea cargo of raw iron. The site goes by Dor L2.

Like the iron bars from a boat that sank in the Danube, the blooms were metal shipped in bulk. Here they serve only to date the anchor and place it on a ship.

Amir Yurman and Mosheko Bachar, of Haifa's Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, guided the divers above and below the water. Marko Runjajić, a co-author, took the photos, drew the maps and modeled the stock in 3D where it lay.

Grape pits and an oak twig

For dating the cargo there were grape pits and resin from inside two amphorae. An oak twig stuck in one of the blooms was dated too, and a model of those dates ends the ship's last trip before 536 BCE.

Wood sampled from the stock went to the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia. Its result gave 93.1 percent odds of a date between 770 and 513 BCE. The odds for 502 to 485 BCE were 1.7 percent.

The authors say this fits the cargo and its basket-handled amphorae, dated to the late 7th or early 6th century BCE. The 1997 Persian-period date would have meant somewhere between about 586 and 332 BCE at Dor.

Stone stocks and Mazarrón 2

Around 750 BCE, ships in the Mediterranean still dropped stone weight anchors. Most were over 440 pounds (200 kilograms), heavy enough, the authors say, to put both crew and ship at risk.

Their replacements had a wooden shank with arms that dug into the seabed. A heavy crossbar of stone, or of wood and lead, sat across the top.

German underwater archaeologist Gerhard Kapitän and other scholars drew up the main dating scheme for these anchors in the 1970s and 1980s.

Hardly any with wood had been found by then. Johnson's team asks whether the type arrived 200 to 300 years earlier than Kapitän proposed.

Dor's stock is about as old as the Karaburun anchors from Turkey's Black Sea coast. It is also close in age to the anchor of Mazarrón 2, a small boat that sank off southern Spain.

Dor L2 and Mazarrón 2 were both local boats, at opposite ends of the sea. Long distances "were no obstacle for the transfer of maritime innovations," the authors argued.

The shank and arms are gone

No shank, arms or iron teeth were found with the stock. It was "deemed too fragile to be moved," the authors wrote, and nobody turned it over. For the bottom face the team relied on other anchors, the wood sample, 3D measurements and a small model cast in lead.

In the middle sits a tongue and groove joint. The paper calls it "the only example of such a complex joint in a wooden composite anchor." How it fitted the lost shank is a guess.

An anchor that size suggests a ship longer than the 26.7-foot (8.15-meter) Mazarrón 2 boat. It may also have been longer than the 47.6-foot (14.5-meter) Ma'agan Mikhael ship. Better numbers "await further excavation and perhaps discovery of the ship timbers," the authors wrote.

According to UC San Diego, only about a quarter of the sandbar holding the cargoes has been dug. Parts of a hull may lie under Dor L2.

Between the Greek islands of Karpathos and Kasos, another underwater survey has documented a corridor with more than 2,600 years of seafaring history.

The stock is still on the lagoon floor, where the 1995 divers first piled sandbags on it.

The full study was published in the journal Journal of Maritime Archaeology.

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