Archaeologists Are Finding Dugout Canoes in the American Midwest as Old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt

Tamara Thomsen was 24 feet underwater when she spotted it: the decaying end of a dugout canoe, a great white oak carved some 1,200 years ago. It was jutting out of a sandy ridge in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota—a body of water skirting Madison, the state capital—and she knew it was a remarkable find. “What I did not understand was the breadth of the discovery.”

Thomsen was diving that summer day in 2021 as a private citizen, chasing fish and collecting trash. More often, you’ll find the maritime archaeologist in the Great Lakes, surveying deep-water sites for the Wisconsin Historical Society. Lake Mendota had not been on the archaeologist’s radar, and she certainly wasn’t hunting for dugout canoes. Thomsen usually looks for shipwrecks, like 19th-century freighters. 

It might seem remarkable that she recognized the find for what it was: Dugout canoes, the world’s oldest boat type found to date, are simply hollowed-out logs. In 2018, however, Thomsen had teamed up with Sissel Schroeder, an archaeologist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to help an undergraduate student catalog Wisconsin’s extant dugout canoes. When the project began, historians believed 11 existed in collections across the state. Less than a year later, after scouring private collections, supper clubs, local museums and more, the team had counted 34.

Thomsen’s 2021 find spurred the two women to continue their hunt—and take it public. Establishing the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project, the pair and helpers have so far documented a full 79 dugout canoes, including two of the ten oldest dugouts found in eastern North America, ranging between 4,000 and 5,000 years old. Wisconsin’s dugout catalog sheds light on Indigenous knowledge, habits of trade and travel—and even environmental adaptation. But the project also conjures a sense of magic in the familiar: To travel thousands of years back into history, look no further than America’s urban lakes and rivers.

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The Madison area, known as Dejope in the Ho-Chunk language, was an Indigenous metropolis before the arrival of Europeans, says Bill Quackenbush, tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation, one of Wisconsin’s 11 federally recognized tribes. Dejope was a richly interconnected society. “There’s this misconception that we had temporary villages here and there,” Quackenbush says, “but Madison was one large living community.”

Carving dugout canoes would’ve been a community occasion, Quackenbush explains: Men would work multiple logs while families gathered, ate and prepared for the coming season. The carving process—with shells or stone tools—could take weeks or even months; once complete, a canoe would sit along the shoreline for the whole village to use. Nearly as vital to thriving as fire, a working canoe meant open trade and shipping networks, fishing in deeper waters, and travel to faraway places. In winter, the Ho-Chunk would secure the vessels in shallow water, to prevent them from drying out before spring. 

In fact, a map of the found dugouts shows us not just where this community lived, but how it moved and changed in pace with the Earth over millennia: Just 300 yards from where Thomsen found that first canoe in Mendota, she later uncovered 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 savannas of ancient Dejope.

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“No one does this,” says Amy Rosebrough, Wisconsin state archaeologist, referring to the relatively new approach of treating small, urban waterways as potential archaeological sites. “The only thing even comparable that I can think of is the mudskippers in London who walk up and down the Thames.” 

Like those mudskippers, also known as mudlarks, who scour riverbanks for artifacts from London’s past—Roman pottery, Victorian silverware—everyday citizens report dugout sightings across Wisconsin. The best specimens have wound up at historical societies and museums, including a Menominee canoe currently sitting in Smithsonian Institution storage in Maryland. Some are hung high above supper-club tables or auctioned off to private collectors. A few, miraculously, have managed to stay within their tribes, including the Ho-Chunk, the Menominee and the Lac du Flambeau. 

It’s the rumors of still-submerged specimens—mostly anecdotes from hunters, fishers and boaters—that make Thomsen and Schroeder put in serious legwork. Receiving leads via a tipline, the women then go hunting themselves, diving, wading or kayaking in Wisconsin’s bogs and shallow lakes, with little more to guide them than loose coordinates and a snorkel. 

The duo has thus far confirmed 79 of 112 reports across the state, and new ones are still popping up with regularity. Most of the finds are in surprisingly good condition—a few have even been accompanied by paddles or tools, like net sinkers and an adz, a wood-cutting implement similar to an ax. Some have turned out to be fragments, which is even more remarkable: The worse the specimen, the more likely it’s deemed kindling and thrown on the fire. 

When they locate a dugout, Thomsen and Schroeder start by collecting data the old-fashioned way. They fill notebooks with drawings, measurements and lists of stylistic quirks, from thwarts (structural crosspieces) and drag marks to charring and paint. Leaving all specimens in situ, Thomsen then does photogrammetry using a GoPro camera; when working above ground, she also uses lidar, or “light detection and ranging,” a remote measuring sensor built into newer iPhones and iPads that, with a 3D scanning app, can create an instant 3D model for further study. “Sometimes the GoPro works, and sometimes the lidar works,” says Thomsen. “Sometimes they’re possessed by spirits, and they don’t want to be scanned at all.”

When possible, the duo also takes a sample of wood about the size of a matchstick—typically from the outer part of the canoe—for further analysis and dating. Ranging in age from 150 to nearly 5,000 years, varying in length from 7 to 36 feet, many canoes postdate the arrival of Europeans. Once in a while, though, they’ll find a specimen that shares a timeline with Beowulf, the Phoenician alphabet or even early math. 

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Thomsen has made discoveries at Lake Mendota that stand as some of the state’s oldest: Carbon dating places her first find at 1,200 years old, and her second around 3,000 years old. The Mendota cache currently includes the survey’s oldest, an elm dugout carbon-dated at more than 4,500 years old.

Beyond carbon dating, certain samples also undergo strontium isotope analysis, a means of measuring neutron variation within the same element to determine where that element originated. Wood type is identified via the Forest Products Laboratory, the national research laboratory of the United States Forest Service, conveniently down the street from Schroeder’s office. Thomsen and Schroeder have also sent a few samples to University of Wisconsin-Platteville for dendrochronology studies, because tree-ring data, which helps date the canoes, can also shed light on past climates.

Using those four methods of analysis, the scientists frame their hypotheses. Across Indigenous groups, for example, prevailing wisdom says that dugouts were carved from softwoods, like pine or cypress. But a third of the survey’s dugouts have turned out to be hardwoods, including oak, hickory and elm; the latter is known for its tough, interlocking grain—and its modern reputation for requiring the use of power tools. “If we start to parse this data by time,” explains Schroeder, “it ends up telling a story of traditional ecological knowledge … and cultural ingenuity.”

Wood type, even without tree-ring data, provides clues to Wisconsin’s past environments. Thousands of years ago, southern Wisconsin transitioned from a closed-canopy oak forest to an oak savanna—in an open prairie, oaks, instead of growing straight and tall, branch too early for canoe-making. The ancient Ho-Chunk, who also inhabited modern-day Illinois and elsewhere, then turned to the arrow-straight elm, despite its unyielding, hardwood structure. Similar patterns follow after European contact: When settlers felled northern Wisconsin’s white pine forests, tribes like the Menominee turned to trees such as hemlock and butternut. 

Variations aside, most dugouts look roughly the same to the untrained eye, which is striking, since their makers had vastly different resources and tools. Three thousand years ago, the Ho-Chunk were carving in a world before agriculture and pottery. The design needed no improvement. As Quackenbush puts it, “When something works, why change it?”

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With the dugout buzz circulating around Lake Mendota—Thomsen’s discoveries have made international headlines—Madison’s Ho-Chunk population has found an opportunity to reconnect with its past, Quackenbush says. In 2022, a group of Ho-Chunk youth and tribal members finished carving a fresh cottonwood canoe using traditional methods and then paddled it across the city’s four lakes; in the summer of 2024, tribal members carved another and took it down the Mississippi River. 

Quackenbush, who works closely with the Wisconsin Historical Society, has taken up his own hunt, too: An expert in ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, he’s leading his team in the search for more Lake Mendota artifacts, from canoes to campfire rings. “We’re always looking for layers of information that we can share even within our own tribal communities,” he explains. “We need that connection—we’re wrapped up in the same fast pace of today.”

Thomsen and Schroeder consider the local tribes and all the citizens involved in the project as partners in their research—a debt they acknowledge in every public talk they give. Other states seem to be taking inspiration from Wisconsin—Minnesota, Michigan and others have started cataloging their own canoe archives—while the Society for American Archaeology devoted a symposium last year entirely to the humble dugout. 

Unlike many artifacts, canoes offer an inviting point of entry to the past, Rosebrough says. “People have a lot of trouble connecting to spear points,” she says. But people know canoes, and they know lakes—and it’s bracing to recognize that those depths might hold the ultimate sunken treasure. 

Jacqueline Kehoe | READ MORE

Jacqueline Kehoe is a writer and editor from Madison, Wisconsin.