Land Canoes Found in the Midwest Are As Old As the Pyramids of Egypt

On waterways connected to the Majestic Lakes, researchers are finding boats that tell thousands of years of indigenous history.

Tamara Thomsen was more than 7 meters underwater when she spotted this: the weathered end of a land canoe made from a large white oak tree carved about 1,200 years ago. It was sticking out of a sandbar in Wisconsin's Lake Mendota - a body of water that wraps around Madison, the state capital - and she knew it was a remarkable find.

"No I didn't realize the magnitude of the discovery," Thomsen says. On that summer day in 2021, Thomsen was diving as a private citizen, chasing fish and picking up trash.

More often than not, a maritime archaeologist can be found on the Great Lakes exploring deep water sites for the Wisconsin Historical Society. Lake Mendota was not on the archaeologist's radar, and she certainly wasn't hunting for canoes. Normally, Thomsen looks for shipwrecks, such as nineteenth-century cargo ships. It may seem surprising that she recognized this find:

In 2018, Thomsen, along with archaeologist Cissel Schroeder from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helped a graduate student catalog Wisconsin's surviving land canoes. When the project began, historians believed there were 11 in collections across the state. Less than a year later, after researching private collections, clubs, local museums and more, the team counted 34 canoes.

Thomsen's find in 2021 spurred the two women to continue their search and make it public. After founding the Wisconsin Land Canoe Project, she and her assistants documented 79 canoes, including two of the ten oldest canoes found in eastern North America, ranging from 4,000 to 5,000 years old.

The Wisconsin Land Canoe Catalog sheds light on indigenous knowledge, habits of trade and travel, and even environmental adaptations. But the project also evokes a sense of magic in familiar surroundings.

According to Bill Quackenbush, a historic preservationist for the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) Tribe, one of 11 federally recognized tribes in Wisconsin, the Madison area, known in the Ho-Chunk language as Dejope, was a Native metropolis before the arrival of Europeans.

Dejope was an interconnected society. "There's a misconception that we had temporary villages here and there," Quackenbush says, "but Madison was one big living community.

Carving wood to make canoes was a communal endeavor, Quackenbush explains: Men would work a few logs while families gathered, ate, and prepared for the coming season.

A working canoe was almost as vital to prosperity as fire and meant open trade and shipping networks, the ability to fish in deeper waters and travel to distant places. The Ho-Chunk people anchored ships in shallow water for the winter to keep them dry until spring.

A map of the canoe land finds shows us not only where this community lived, but also how it moved and changed with the Earth over the millennia: just 275 meters from where Thomsen found the first canoe in Mendota, she later discovered a cache of at least ten canoes along an underwater ridge that geologists have identified as a previous, now lost shoreline, a beach in the savannahs of ancient Dejope.

"Nobody's done this before," says Amy Rosebrough, a Wisconsin archaeologist, referring to a relatively new approach to studying small urban waterways as potential archaeological sites. "The only thing that can compare to this is London skippers going up and down the Thames."

Like skippers who find artifacts of London's past - Roman pottery, Victorian silverware - everyday citizens report sightings of canoe landers throughout Wisconsin.

The best specimens end up in historical societies and museums, including a Menominee canoe now in the Smithsonian Institution in Maryland. Some hang high above club tables or are auctioned off to private collectors. Some miraculously managed to remain in their tribes, including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Lac du Flambeau.

It's the rumors of still-submerged specimens - mostly from stories from hunters, fishermen and boaters - that keep Thomsen and Schroeder hard at work. Receiving tips over the phone line, the women then set out on their own to hunt, diving, wading or kayaking through Wisconsin's swamps and shallow lakes with nothing but coordinates and dive gear.

To date, the duo has confirmed 79 of 112 reports across the state, and new reports continue to appear regularly. Most of the finds are in surprisingly good condition - some even come with oars or tools such as nets and an adze (cleaver), an axe-like wood chopping tool.

Upon discovering the land canoe, Thomsen and Schroeder begin collecting data the old-fashioned way. They fill notebooks with drawings, measurements, and lists of stylistic quirks, from structural lintels and drag marks to charring and painting.

Leaving all the samples in place, Thomsen then conducts photogrammetry with a GoPro camera; when she's working above ground, she also uses lidar, or "light and range detection," a remote sensing sensor built into the new iPhones and iPads that, with the help of a 3D scanning app, can instantly create a 3D model for further study.

When possible, a small team of researchers also takes a matchhead-sized sample of wood - usually from the outside of the canoe - for further analysis and dating. The canoes range in age from 150 to nearly 5,000 years old, in length from 2 to 11 meters, and many have been dated to the time of European arrival. Occasionally, however, it is possible to find a specimen that chronologically coincides with Beowulf, the Phoenician alphabet, or even early mathematics.

Thomsen has made finds at Lake Mendota that are believed to be among the oldest in the state: her first find is 1,200 years old according to carbon dating and her second is about 3,000 years old. The Mendota stash currently holds the oldest find, an elm canoe earthwork that is more than 4,500 years old by carbon dating.

In addition to carbon dating, some samples are also subjected to strontium isotope analysis, a way of measuring neutron fluctuations within the same element to determine where that element originated.

The wood species is determined at the Forest Sites Laboratory, a national research laboratory of the U.S. Forest Service, which is located down the street from Schroeder's office. Thomsen and Schroeder also sent several samples to the University of Wisconsin-Platteville for dendrochronological studies, since tree ring data, which helps date the canoe, can also shed light on past climate.

Using these four methods of analysis, scientists make their hypotheses. For example, the prevailing view among indigenous peoples is that earth canoes were carved from soft woods such as pine or cypress. But a third of the land canoes found turned out to be made of hardwoods, including oak, hickory, and elm; the latter is known for its hard, interlocking wood and modern reputation for requiring the use of power tools.

"If we start analyzing these data over time," Schroeder explains, "they end up telling the story of traditional ecological knowledge ... and cultural ingenuity." Wood type, even without tree ring data, provides insight into Wisconsin's past environment.

Thousands of years ago, southern Wisconsin went from closed canopy oak forest to oak savanna, and in the open prairie, the oaks, instead of growing straight and tall, branched too early to make canoes. The ancient Ho-Chunk tribes, who also inhabited modern Illinois and other areas, switched to elm despite its unyielding, hard structure.

The pattern is similar after the arrival of Europeans: When settlers cut down white pine forests in northern Wisconsin, tribes like the Menominee switched to trees such as Canada ash and walnut.

Most earth canoes look about the same to the untrained eye, which is amazing because their makers had very different resources and tools. Three thousand years ago, the ho-chunk were carving in a world where agriculture and pottery did not yet exist. The designs didn't need to be refined. According to Quackenbush, "When something works, why change it?".

Quackenbush said that with the hype surrounding the canoe landings on Lake Mendota - Thomsen's findings made international headlines - the Ho-Chunk population in Madison had an opportunity to reconnect with their past.

In 2022, a group of Ho-Chunk youth and tribal members finished carving a canoe out of fresh poplar using traditional methods and then paddled it down the city's 4 lakes; in the summer of 2024, tribal members carved another and sailed it down the Mississippi River.

Quackenbush, who works closely with the Wisconsin Historical Society, has also taken up his own "hunt": As a GPR expert, he is leading his team in a search for new Lake Mendota artifacts. "We are constantly looking for new information to share even within our own tribal communities," he explains. "We need that connection to the past."

Thomsen and Schroeder consider local tribes and all residents involved in the project to be partners in their research - something they acknowledge in every public appearance. Other states seem to be taking inspiration from Wisconsin - Minnesota, Michigan and others have begun cataloging their own canoe archives, and the Society for American Archaeology last year devoted a symposium exclusively to the humble land canoe.

Unlike many artifacts, canoes offer an attractive entry point into the past. "People have a hard time accepting the sight of the tip of a spear," Rosebrough says. "But people know canoes, they know lakes - and it's inspiring to realize that these depths may hold the truest sunken treasure."