---
title: "A 150-Kilogram Anchor Stock off Israel Shows Lead Replacing Stone 2,600 Years Ago"
description: "Redated to around 600 BCE, the oak-and-lead crosspiece from the Dor Lagoon shows how early sailors locked molten metal inside timber"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-20T21:12:15Z
modified: 2026-10-21T02:22:19Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-150-kilogram-anchor-stock-off-israel-shows-lead-replacing--bc691c
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "technology", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A 150-Kilogram Anchor Stock off Israel Shows Lead Replacing Stone 2,600 Years Ago

*Redated to around 600 BCE, the oak-and-lead crosspiece from the Dor Lagoon shows how early sailors locked molten metal inside timber*

By Nate Ledger · October 20, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-150-kilogram-anchor-stock-off-israel-shows-lead-replacing--bc691c

## In brief

- An oak-and-lead anchor stock found in Israel’s Dor Lagoon in 1994–1995 has been redated to the late 7th or early 6th century BCE
- The stock was about 2.2 m long, with four lead cores of about 113 kg and a total weight of roughly 150 kg
- An associated cargo of amphorae, bowls and nearly 70 kg of unworked iron supplied radiocarbon-dated organic material
- Eight square openings formed lead ‘casting bolts’ that locked the internal weights into the wood
- Finds from Anatolia show stone-weighted and lead-filled anchors remained in use side by side for generations

A large piece of oak has been lying under sandbags at the bottom of the Dor Lagoon, south of Haifa, for about thirty years. Divers from the University of Haifa and Texas A&M University found it during surveys in 1994–1995. They took it for something from the Persian period, decided it was too fragile to raise, covered it up and left it there. That was the sensible call, and it also meant the object waited three decades for anyone to work out what it actually was. The answer, [as Arkeonews reported](https://arkeonews.net/2600-year-old-giant-lead-filled-anchor-among-the-oldest-ever-discovered/), is in a [new paper in the *Journal of Maritime Archaeology*](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-026-09542-1) by K. Johnson, T.E. Levy, M. Runjajić and colleagues. It dates the object to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, a good deal older than first thought, which puts it among the earliest known examples of its technology.

The thing is an anchor stock: the weighted crosspiece of a two-armed wooden anchor, not the whole anchor. When an anchor like this drops, the stock’s weight turns it so that one of the arms digs into the seabed. Without that, you have an expensive wooden fork lying flat on the sand. The Dor stock was originally about 2.2 metres long, 16 centimetres wide and 10 centimetres thick. Inside it were four lead cores that the researchers estimate weighed about 113 kilograms, for a total of roughly 150 kilograms. So around three-quarters of the weight is lead and only about 37 kilograms is oak. The wood is mostly there to hold the metal. It is the largest stock of this kind documented in the eastern Mediterranean.

![A woodcut-style underwater scene shows a long wooden frame holding four rectangular stone weights on a sandy seabed surrounded by rocks and seaweed.](https://rews.cc/img/aeb8fb21d08f7b5fac97ed7577108e22910bc4de.webp)

## How a cargo fixes a date

The new date comes from what was found around the stock. Teams from the University of Haifa and the University of California, San Diego relocated it and excavated the deposits nearby. They found a cargo: at least 15 basket-handled amphorae, four Phoenician-type amphorae, three thin-walled bowls and nine pieces of unworked iron weighing nearly 70 kilograms in total. The cargo also held datable organic material, including grape seeds, resin and an oak twig stuck inside an iron bloom. Radiocarbon dates from those finds support the late-seventh to early-sixth-century date.

The deposit is known as Dor L2. It is one of three Iron Age cargoes from the lagoon that a team led by Assaf Yasur-Landau described [in *Antiquity* in May 2025](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/iron-age-ship-cargoes-from-the-harbour-of-dor-israel/D44019724498E1221A1E026E25FFEA04). The iron has its own paper, [in *npj Heritage Science*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-026-02409-7), which argues that around 600 BCE raw blooms were traded across the Mediterranean before anyone worked them into bars or tools. UC San Diego’s Thomas Levy has said the cargoes are [yielding data for nine new scientific papers](https://today.ucsd.edu/story/ancient-shipwrecks-rewrite-the-story-of-iron-age-trade). That is a lot of papers from one sunken load of pots and iron. The anchor is one of them.

## The problem with pouring lead into wood

Here is the engineering problem. Imagine you are a carpenter about to pour molten lead into a block of oak. That part is fine. The hard part is keeping the lead in place afterwards, through years of the stock being dropped onto the seabed, dragged and hauled back up. Lead is heavy, and if it isn’t anchored to the timber it will eventually come loose.

![A woodcut-style illustration shows a worker pouring glowing molten metal from a crucible into a cavity in a large timber beside an axe.](https://rews.cc/img/5b56cc1c9781d7e136cf6d1ac27df59ec09bc19a.webp)

The Dor builders had two answers. First they used chisels and adzes to cut four trapezoidal cavities into the oak and poured the lead into those. Then they added eight small square openings along the two sides of the stock. Molten lead ran into those openings and set as projections, called casting bolts, which held the internal weights in place. The joint where the stock met the anchor’s main wooden shaft was also cut with unusually complex recesses, which suggests careful woodworking intended to strengthen the assembly.

The casting bolts are the important part. Archaeologists had already proposed this kind of fastening for ancient anchors whose wood had rotted away and left only the lead behind. That was a reasonable guess. Dor still has its wood, so for the first time the guess can be checked against the object itself.

## Stone, lead and the speed of adoption

The reason to bother with all this is that stone anchors were heavy, and heavy things are hard to lower, raise and handle from a small deck. Wooden anchors with arms grip the seabed better, so they need less dead weight. Putting lead inside a shaped timber concentrates that weight where it does the most good. For comparison, the wooden parts of two anchors found near Karaburun, in Turkey’s İzmir Province, suggest they carried stone stocks of about 200–240 kilograms. Dor’s 150 kilograms is 50 to 90 kilograms lighter. Whoever had to haul it up would have noticed.

![Two men aboard a wooden ship haul a rope attached to a large wooden anchor rising from rough seas, with a stone weight on deck.](https://rews.cc/img/e63104c3757283f50f80a67978b9083c023577dc.webp)

The better design did not take over quickly. The Karaburun anchors show that wood-and-stone designs stayed in use while lead was arriving, and their broad radiocarbon ranges overlap the Dor anchor’s centuries. Other Anatolian finds fill in the sequence. Klazomenai’s ancient harbour at Liman Tepe produced a wooden anchor component from around 600 BCE. The Pabuç Burnu wreck kept a sixth-century BCE stone stock. The Tektaş Burnu wreck, dated to about 450–425 BCE, held lead parts of two composite anchors, whose construction can be compared with the fastening at Dor. Stone and lead were used side by side for generations, and different maritime communities switched at different speeds. Most industries look like this, even when the new product is clearly better.

The researchers also looked at anchors shown on coins from Apollonia Pontica, on the Black Sea coast of present-day Bulgaria. Early coins show curved stocks and later ones show straighter, rectangular shapes, which may reflect the spread of wood-and-lead construction. They are careful to say that coin images cannot establish a chronology by themselves, only that the change fits the archaeology. Early examples from Dor and from Mazarrón in Spain suggest that a useful idea could travel a long way across the Mediterranean, even among ships mostly doing regional trade. That fits with other recent finds about how [early seafarers moved goods around](https://rews.cc/a/off-kekova-a-churn-from-the-dawn-of-trade-a-4-700-year-old-w-a1a139).

The stock’s size suggests it came from a substantial vessel, but no ship timbers have been found to show how big that vessel was. So far, then, the anchor and the cargo have been recovered, and the ship they belonged to has not.