If you grew up near a lake, you have probably wondered what is down there. A lost pair of sunglasses, maybe. A fishing lure or two. An old bottle nobody missed.
Mark Schachtner goes looking for that kind of thing every week. Last May, in a Wisconsin lake, he found something about 1,000 years old.
Schachtner, a diver from Beaver Dam, has been diving for about 10 years. He heads out weekly with the Four Seasons Dive Club, and he loves finding old embossed glass bottles that once held beer or medicine.
On May 6, he joined a volunteer trash cleanup dive in Pewaukee Lake, about 20 miles west of Milwaukee. He was just about to wrap up his dive when he noticed a long shape lying on the lake floor.
It was a dugout canoe, the kind made by hollowing out a single tree. “I found a fossil once in one of the other lakes … but this is the oldest manmade thing I’ve ever found,” he told Wisconsin Public Radio.
He knew what he was looking at because he had read about the ancient canoes found in recent years in Madison’s Lake Mendota. He reported the find to the Wisconsin Historical Society right away.
How Old Is It, Really?
Five days later, Schachtner went back down with Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society. Together they collected measurements, photos, video and wood samples.
The canoe is 17.3 feet long and 1.8 feet wide at its widest point. It is fully intact, in good condition, and sits under about 15 feet of water. A U.S. Department of Agriculture lab identified the wood as white oak.
Radiocarbon testing (a way of dating old wood by measuring the natural decay of carbon) came back in August. It showed a 70 percent chance that the canoe dates to between 992 and 1049 AD. In plain terms, the Historical Society says it was likely in use about 1,000 years ago, a time when maize was a staple crop and people across the region built effigy mounds.
Parked on Purpose
Why would a canoe sit at the bottom of a lake? Thomsen believes it was put there deliberately.
“It’s a classic look for a canoe that had been cached, something that had been intentionally sunk,” she told Wisconsin Public Radio. She explained that Indigenous people of the time often sank canoes on the lake bed and let them fill with sediment. A season or two later, they would dig them out, dry them a little and use them again.
Think of it as the lake-bed version of putting the boat in the garage until next season.
Canoes like this one did not belong to any one person, either. “It was just common knowledge that nobody owned it,” Larry Plucinski, tribal historic preservation officer for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, told the Wisconsin State Journal. “If you needed it, you used it.”
Jon Greendeer, president of the Ho-Chunk Nation, told Wisconsin Public Radio that the find falls within the nation’s territory. Thomsen said the canoe shows char marks from fire, plus scraping likely made with stone tools or shells. Greendeer added that canoes like it may also have carried the nets and weights used to harvest fish.
“You can imagine how much work went into each one of these,” Greendeer said.
Why It Is Staying Put
The Historical Society has no plans to bring the canoe up. Native Nations, including the Ho-Chunk Nation, have said they wish it to remain in place out of respect for their ancestors. The lake water has kept it intact for a thousand years, and out in the air the wood would fall apart without a long and intensive conservation program.
“It’s very remarkable that it’s intact and as beautiful as it is,” Thomsen told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The exact spot is being kept private, and the site is protected by state law. Divers may visit, but nobody may take anything away.
Plucinski suspects there are more canoes waiting to be found. “No matter what lake you go to, there’s probably canoes out there,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal.
Schachtner went down to pick up other people’s trash, and he knew exactly whom to call when he saw something more. That is a habit anyone can borrow, on any shore.