On the European Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, as well as on rivers and lakes, the use of water transport is not in doubt, from at least the beginning of the 9th millennium BC, to judge both from direct evidence (paddles and wrecks) and from the evidence of coastal and island movements. Research into earlier, Late Pleistocene, island mobility is hindered on the Atlantic side of Europe (in contrast to the Mediterranean) by the loss of the Ice Age coastlines, as well as of the huge territory that extended along the Channel River and across Doggerland (North Sea), through flooding by eustatic sea level change. However, it is very likely that groups used boats in Europe as early as the upper Palaeolithic, if we bear in mind the global picture of pioneering maritime colonizations. Therefore, in all likelihood, the lands and coasts of Western Europe will have experienced a long and complex nautical history, of which only very faint traces remain. In envisaging these first journeys, and particularly in considering the boats then used, logboats dominate the scene. These boats are well represented among the wrecks excavated in estuaries, river basins and lakes. Since the 9th-8th millennium BC, when the first example in the archaeological record in Western Europe was used, this same basic “construction principle” (i.e. the architectural design of the boat) has been in use throughout the ages to the present day, where a tradition of expanded logboats is still alive in Slovenia. Over many generations, construction methods have progressively integrated a number of innovations, mainly with the aim of increasing the boats’ load capacity (expansion, raising, etc.). A monoxylous base can even be identified in some of the early plank boatbuilding traditions that were used in historical times. The number of wrecks resulting from these long-lasting traditions is high: in Europe, the inventory total stands at over 3,500 examples, which gives us a unique signal in the archaeological record of nautical remains. In this field, only a few examples of “architectural families” can be identified for the pre-industrial periods, bringing together a group of boats related by morphology, structure and tech-nical attributes, as well as by historical filiation. None of these “families” even remotely approaches the number of logboats known. However, within this substantial corpus, fewer than 20% of the specimens have been dated by radiocarbon or dendrochronology. Because of their dependence on the raw material, it is not easy to identify typo-chronological trends among these monoxylous vessels, many of which were very simply fashioned as close to the shape of the log as possible. Their chronological attribution is therefore a matter of absolute dating alone, and thus only this small proportion can be taken into account for study. There is a predominance of logboats dating from the Middle Ages to the present day: these represent between 45% and 60% of the corpus. Logboats from the prehistoric and protohistoric periods remain few in number. There are only 17 examples in a Mesolithic context, half of which belong to the Danish Final Ertebølle, with a strong LBK influence. There are fewer than 30 Neolithic logboats, and Chalcolithic and Bronze Age examples are similarly sparse. For the Iron Age, fewer than 20 are known. Across seven millennia and over a geographical area on the scale of Europe, we therefore have only about 100 examples. As with other organic archaeological remains, the number of examples decreases with the passage of time, making it more difficult to contextualize them. In estuaries, logboats remain the only type of pre-2nd millennium boat that has survived to us, and on inland waters (except in the Danube basin), they are currently the only boat type to survive prior to the Roman conquest. While logboats will no doubt have been common from the beginning of the Holocene period, when primary forests proliferated, they were probably not the only type of boat to be used, nor were they necessarily the commonest. There are good grounds to hypothesize that diverse types of watercraft existed, using various construction principles, alongside or even pre-dating monoxylous vessels. These will have included various kinds of light boat featuring a frame made from plant or animal elements, their hulls covered by skins or bark (i.e. curragh-, coracle- and kayak-like vessels), and it may be that vessels made using reed bundles were also in use. To this range, from the 2nd millennium BC at least, seve-ral types of plank-built boat were added, and these increased in number and complexity over time. On inland waters, numerous types of raft and ferry made from linked trunks or reed bundles probably coexisted with these boats. The great scarcity of remains from these boats could be due to multiple causes, including the differential conservation of perishable materials, the recycling of components and the breakdown of the assembled structures. In contrast to logboats, all these craft are the result of an assembly of individual elements that can, once abandoned on the shore, become detached and degrade into fragments too far removed from their original architecture to be easily recognisable: a fragment of raft shaft, a structural rib or lath of a skin boat, or a single plank. In contrast, thanks to their compact woody mass offering good resistance to burial, and to the common practice of deliberately sinking them during periods of unemployment in order to ensure their longevity, logboats have ended up much better preserved than their assembled counterparts, thereby making this particular vessel design “hyper-visible” and over-represented in the archaeological record. What might be the contours of this nautical diversity that is only partially revealed to us? The purpose of this paper is to open up and delimit the field of possibilities, starting, with all due respect, with an interest in the majestic barrel which, in contrast to the invisibility of the others, becomes the “tree that obscures the forest”.