This report is in collaboration with our partners at ICT, formerly Indian Country Today.

“We found something,” Tamara Thomsen said. “Here — you see how the contour lines are a little bit flatter. We made it to this turnaround, and that’s where the canoe was. Lots of cool stuff you can find in the lake. Just got to go look!”

Thomsen is a maritime archaeologist for the Wisconsin Historical Society. She went on a recreational dive to the bottom of Lake Mendota in 2021 to collect fisherman debris, and told a colleague she saw a long slope exposed through 24 feet of water.

“I really think that was a dugout canoe,” she said. “I don’t think that that was just a random piece of wood on the bottom. But we should get another tank and we should go out — and I think I can find it again.”

And Thomsen did.

“But only the top portion was exposed, so the bottom was still covered with silt and it was just pristine,” she said. “It was so nice that I thought, well it can’t be old.”

Thomsen and a team of archaeologists pulled the canoe from the lake and through radiocarbon data analysis found it to be 1,200-years-old.

Or young — two more very, very ancient canoes were found a year later.

“One ended up being 3,000 years old, which was recovered and in the tank. And then we found another one next to it, a little bit shorter — 2,000 years old,” she said.

Thomsen said the canoes are at least 15 feet long and made of cottonwood, elm and oak.

“Red oak is very porous, and so they would have had to understand how to seal that cellular structure in the canoe when they were building it in order to make the vessel watertight,” she explained.

A total of 16 canoes were found in Lake Mendota between 2022 and 2025 — the oldest is 5,200 years old.

“To put yourself in that place and think, what were these people like?” Thomsen pondered. “What were their lives like? What were they doing in these canoes? And then why are all these canoes in this one spot?”

At what point in this did she start reaching out to Wisconsin’s Native nations?

“Before any of the canoes were recovered, there was consultation with the Native nations of Wisconsin” Thomsen said.

Lawrence Plucinski, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, helped with the preservation process when the second canoe was pulled from the lake. He said his ancestors used inland waterways as transportation between one side of the lake to the other to harvest, hunt and fish.

“You couldn’t carry much, because they weren’t like the total dugout-type canoes — some were more leveler,” Plucinski said.

What does that mean? The fact that they didn’t carry and take them with them. Were they left there?

“The canoes were not owned by each individual or whatever. It was like a community,” he explained.

There are no plans to move the remaining 14 canoes that are sitting here at the bottom of Lake Mendota, in a decision made collaboratively between Thomsen and Wisconsin’s Native nations with the goal of responsible stewardship.

“We’re not in the business of bringing up the canoes, especially the shape that they were in,” Plucinski said. “They would have — they broke apart in your hand if you brought them up.”

The two extracted canoes are sitting in a makeshift tank filled with polyethylene glycol at the State Archive Preservation Facility in Madison to stabilize the fragile but heavy wood. Then they will be freeze dried.

“Any water that’s left in the cellular structure will be taken off,” Thomsen explained.

One canoe will be stored at the Preservation Facility, and the other will be on display at the upcoming Wisconsin History Center, where Plucinski said their Indigenous history can be preserved and shared.

“Let our knowledge be told,” Plucinski said. “Let our history be told of how we traveled.”

This report is in collaboration with our partners at ICT.