Archaeologists recovered an “invaluable” canoe – carved thousands of years before European colonizers set foot on North American soil – from a Wisconsin lakebed, according to a historical society.
Photo from the Wisconsin Historical Society
About 3,000 years ago, indigenous people of the Ho Chunk Nation in the Lake Mendota region carved a dugout canoe, the Wisconsin Historical Society said in a news release on Thursday, Sept. 22. A single piece of white oak was transformed into a canoe measuring about 14.5 feet long.
At some point, the lake claimed the canoe, but not any more.
An archaeologist teaching a scuba dive class in May noticed a canoe sticking out of the lakebed, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Experts at the local historical society – which recovered a 1,200-year-old dugout canoe in November 2021 – thought it was a joke, Channel 3000 reported. It wasn’t. Archaeologists found the second canoe within 100 yards of where they found the first canoe.
Researchers are now exploring “the possibility that the canoes were near what is now submerged village sites,” Dr. James Skibo, Wisconsin Historical Society state archaeologist said in the release.
The carbon dating report determined the canoe was made in 1,000 B.C., the historical society said. Researchers ran the report three times before they could believe it, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
This canoe is the oldest canoe ever found in the Great Lakes region – about 1,000 years older than any previous discoveries, archaeologists said.
The canoe provides historians with “the earliest direct evidence” that water transportation began with the arrival of native people, the release said. Archaeologists had previously only assumed or guessed this, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Divers carefully brought the canoe to the surface on Sept. 22, floating it to shore on corrugated metal, photos showed. People gathered around to witness the historic re-discovery.
Divers brought the canoe to the surface then floated it toward the crowd waiting on shore. Photo from the Wisconsin Historical Society
The canoe’s discovery was particularly significant to people from the Ho Chunk Nation.
“The recovery of this canoe built by our ancestors gives further physical proof that Native people have occupied Teejop (Four Lakes) for millennia,” Ho-Chunk President Marlon WhiteEagle said in the release, “that our ancestral lands are here and we had a developed society of transportation, trade and commerce.”
“Every person that harvested and constructed this caašgegu (white oak) into a canoe put a piece of themselves into it,” WhiteEagle said. “By preserving this canoe, we are honoring those that came before us.”
In its current fragmented state, the canoe is the “consistency of wet cardboard,” archaeologists told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The canoe will be taken to the State Archive Preservation Facility in Madison for cleaning, historians said. Once cleaned, the canoe will be placed into a “preservation vat” – alongside the 1,200-year-old-canoe – for two years to ensure all remaining water is removed.
A full view of the 3,000-year-old dugout canoe. Photo from the Wisconsin Historical Society
Lake Mendota is about 90 miles west of Milwaukee.
