ABSTRACT
The skin boat’s place in prehistory has probably been examined even less than that of the reed boat. Unlike the dug-out, early examples of which have been excavated, neither of these two types is likely to survive in archaeological contexts. 1 But the reed boat at least had the advantage of being recorded in early historical times in the great civilisations of the Nile, the Euphrates and the Indus. The skin boat, on the other hand, tended to be used most on the edges of the populated world.
