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The oldest known canoe in the Great Lakes region, dating to 1000 BCE, is found in Madison, Wisconsin [1]
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Date: 2022-09-24
Relieved excavators secure the oldest canoe ever found in the Great Lakes region, Sept. 22, 2022
Tamara Thomsen is getting a little too good at this.
Late last year, the maritime archaeologist was doing a recreational dive in Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, when she discovered a 1,200-year-old dugout canoe, fashioned from a single white-oak tree, on the lakebed. Most people would have dismissed it as some old log, but Thomsen knew better. This canoe included stone sinkers, very solid evidence that it was used for fishing.
Then in May of this year, she was giving a scuba lesson just 100 yards away from her first find when lightning struck again. But when the radiocarbon dating came back on a fragment of this one, even Thomsen was a bit dumbfounded. The canoe she’d found dated to 1000 BCE, making it far and away the oldest canoe ever discovered in the Great Lakes region. This hollowed-out tree trunk, once ridden by early Americans, had sat at the bottom of a lake for 3,000 years.
It’s not so easy to recover something like this without badly damaging it, so Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologists and members of Wisconsin’s Native Nations set to work right away planning how to get this right, and finally on Thursday (Sept. 22) the deed was completed successfully. After a hand excavation on the lakebed, the craft was carefully transported from Lake Mendota to the State Archive Preservation Facility in Madison for preservation and storage.
The 3,000-year-old canoe safely reaches shore
Members of Ho-Chunk Nation touch a canoe their ancestors crafted 3,000 years ago
“The recovery of this canoe built by our ancestors gives further physical proof that Native people have occupied Teejop (Four Lakes) for millennia, that our ancestral lands are here and we had a developed society of transportation, trade and commerce,” said Ho-Chunk President Marlon WhiteEagle . (That’s him on the right in the figures above.) “Every person that harvested and constructed this caašgegu (white oak) into a canoe put a piece of themselves into it. By preserving this canoe, we are honoring those that came before us. We appreciate our partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society, working together to preserve part of not only our ancestors’ history but our state’s history.”
When WhiteEagle talks about Teejop , he means the four large lakes in the Madison area: Mendota, Monona, Waubesa, and Kegonsa:
Both canoes are doing well in their preservation vats:
Ho-Chunk and Wisconsin Historical Society folks get together to visit the 1,200-year-old canoe in its preservation vat
The thing about dugout canoes, even newly made ones, is that you can’t let them dry out, or else they will begin to crack. So what is going on in the preservation vats, though the WHS hasn’t disclosed it exactly, is likely something like this: The water is being replaced with polyethylene glycol (PEG), a water-soluble polymer, so that when complete freeze-drying does take place, the wood won’t get so brittle that it cracks. This is a two-year process (!), and after that time, we’ll be able to appreciate the preserved canoes out in the open. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has an exhibit of a preserved seventeenth-century dugout canoe that was treated similarly (and even this is only a cast):
Cast of the Dugout on exhibit in the Ohio Prehistory Gallery, Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The text on the white cards points out tool marks and burned or burnished areas on the floor of the craft.
I should point out here that a dugout canoe is not easy to make . People still do it today with axes and chainsaws, and it still requires a hell of a lot of effort . So you can imagine how hard it was with stone tools.
Dude is making a dugout canoe from a white oak log with a chainsaw! Now try doing this with stone tools and elbow grease
If you’re wondering about the very oldest canoes discovered in all of North America, that distinction still belongs to those from DeLeon Springs in Florida, where dugout canoes made by the Mayaca people 5,000 to 6,000 years ago have been found .
It’s a complex thing to try and opine on, and I always worry that I’ll say it wrong, but we Americans, of all stripes, should take much more pride than we do in the history that the people living here for millennia — the true “real Americans” — established for us. We late arrivers (my family got here in 1912) are just a drop in the bucket. The people that have been here for 30,000 years are the soul of this continent, and the rest of us should do a better job of acknowledging that and embracing it. We should be proud to be a part of it!
I hope that finds like this, from our own history — in 1000 BCE! — can be a step in that direction.
Tamara Thomsen’s consecutive finds suggest there may well be much more out there in Teejop, the Four Lakes. If you happen to be snorkeling or scuba diving in the Madison area, keep your eyes open, will ya?
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