More than 9 m long boat, dug out of a single oak trunk
Soon it will be a hundred years since the dugout canoe first excited the interest and imagination of visitors. In Slovenia, this is the only dugout canoe that can be seen in a museum. This more than 9 m long boat was dug out of a single oak trunk. It was long presumed to have been crafted by the pile dwellers more than four thousand years age. It turned out though that the canoe was used later, at the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age (9th century BC); not a surprising finding considering that the local inhabitants and people elsewhere in Europe employed such boats as the means of transportation up to modern times.
The canoe, as well as other organic residues, was preserved on the Ljubljansko barje (Ljubljana Marshes) due to specific anaerobic conditions. The dugout canoe was discovered by the farmer Martin Sterle while digging a drainage ditch.