University Place

Dugout Canoes of Wisconsin

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

I’m Tom Zinnen.

I work here at UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.

I also work for the Division of Extension Wisconsin 4H.

And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.

Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you two folks; Sissel Schroeder from the Department of Anthropology, and Tamara Thomsen from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

They’re gonna be talking with us about dugout canoes of Wisconsin.

Sissel Schroeder was born in Madison, Wisconsin and grew up in Wausau and went to Wausau East High School.

Then she went to Luther College and studied biology and anthropology.

Then she came back to Wisconsin to go to UW-Milwaukee to get her master’s degree in anthropology.

She went to Penn State to get her PhD in anthropology and then did a postdoc at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Her first faculty position was at the University of Kentucky, and then she came here to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the year 2000.

Tamara Thomsen was born in Bethesda, Maryland and went to Carmel High School in Indiana.

Then she came here to UW-Madison to study horticulture and agronomy as an undergrad.

Stayed to get a master’s degree in genetics.

While she was an undergrad, she took a course in scuba diving, which turned out to be pivotal.

She worked for Jillian Banfield in the Geology and Geophysical Department.

And, were you doing the mine diving then?

– Tamara: Mm-hmm.

– And then started as a volunteer at the Wisconsin Historical Society and got on as an employee there in 2004.

Tamara’s gonna lead off, and then Sissel will speak.

Would you please join me in welcoming Sissel Schroeder and Tamara Thomsen to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?

[audience applauding] – Tamara: Thanks for having us.

– Tom: Appreciate it.

– Well, thanks for having us back and thank you for the introduction, Tom.

So it’s always entertaining to hear your life spelled out by Tom Zinnen, you know?

[all laughing] So I’m gonna start off by telling you a little story of how we got into this project.

So how many people, first of all, know about the Lake Mendota canoe cache that’s been found?

It’s about everybody here.

It’s, yeah, it made a lot of news worldwide.

And a lot of people will ask, “How in the world, when you see something “that looks like this, how did you know that that was a dugout canoe?”

Because to most people, this looks like just a regular log on the bottom.

And the answer is, is that I’ve looked at an awful lot of dugout canoes ahead of going diving, and I just accidentally stumbled into to these canoes on the bottom of Lake Mendota.

So back in 2018, so I work for the State Historical Society in the Maritime Preservation and Archeology Office, and in 2018, Ryan Smazal, who was an undergraduate in the History Department, came into our office and he was interested in doing a senior thesis project, something related to maritime history.

And we spent about two weeks looking through files, trying to pique his interest and see, you know, what he could do for a thesis project.

And we ended up settling on an evaluation of dugout canoes that are in collections across the state.

Ryan wasn’t a diver at the time, so he couldn’t do underwater archaeology, but he did become a diver.

And turns out too, that he had just learned to drive.

So even sending him to a place like Bayfield was like sending him to the Moon.

[audience chuckling] We ended up accompanying him on a lot of these projects so that he could learn the techniques for doing recordation and how to keep those records and how to report on them.

And so as a result, I saw a lot of dugout canoes.

At first when I proposed this to him, we thought there were 11 dugout canoes in collections across the state.

We had that in our folders at the Historical Society.

And of those canoes, they are, they would range in age from about 150 years old to 1,850 years old.

And the 1,850-year-old one is the fragmentary canoe that’s at Kenosha Public Museum.

But after he finished his thesis project, we knew that there were 34 canoes, and since then, canoes continue to come out of the woodwork.

We even learned about another one yesterday, so we are now up to 70 known canoes, which are either in collections or are still on the bottom.

They remain on the bottom of lakes in Wisconsin.

So so far, we have seen 52 of those, and we still have plans to get through the rest of them, hopefully by the end of this summer.

So there’s a lot of work yet to be done, but we also have more information that we’re getting.

A larger sample set means more information.

That’s the problem with science, isn’t it?

So those range in age from 80 years old to 4,000 years old.

So it really gives us a large scope of, a large breadth of history.

And two of those canoes are in the Lake Mendota cache.

They’re the oldest, they’re the oldest in the Great Lakes region, but they also fall amongst the ten oldest canoes in eastern North America.

So we really do have a good representation here in the canoes that we’re looking at.

So this shows the quantity of dugouts, and it really puts Wisconsin second in the eastern United States.

Florida only has more than us; they have 400 canoes that have been reported, some anecdotally.

And 100 of those come from one lake called Newnans Lake, which is outside of Gainesville, Florida.

So I don’t know if that counts; that’s all in one spot, but we’ll probably never get to 400, or maybe we will, as people report more canoes and know what they’re looking at.

But at this time, it puts us second, again, in the eastern United States.

So for this presentation today, we’re gonna talk about our statewide survey that we’ve continued on from what Ryan started in 2018.

And it really allows us to tell a larger story of, and actually a poorly understood story of maritime history.

Dugouts in particular, and the Native American use of these dugouts.

So we’re hoping to summarize historical knowledge of dugout canoe technology and use.

We’re going to describe Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project and our commitment to collaboration and engagement.

We’re gonna show how we leverage primary field research and collections-based research, how this has significantly expanded our knowledge of Native American watercraft and maritime history, and provide a broader global contents for Wisconsin dugouts.

So from here, I’m gonna hand it over to Sissel and she’s gonna start with a little background information.

– Thank you, Tami.

Dugouts have been found around the world in places that had the availability of suitable trees.

The oldest securely dated dugout canoes anywhere in the world are shown here, and they date to the early Holocene, between about 6,000 and 9,000 years ago.

And so far, dugout canoes dating to the Pleistocene have not been found.

There’s another interesting aspect of these very early dugouts, including the dugouts from Lake Mendota, and that is that most of them are fairly flat.

They look a little bit, they look more like standup paddle boards than like dugout canoes.

And this may have some implications for understanding of early dugout canoe technology, particularly the harvesting of wood and how they were produced.

However, we do know that even though the earliest dugouts date to the Holocene, so basically the past 10,000 to 12,000 years.

We do know that watercraft extend much further back in time, most likely rafts.

And the reason that we know that is a paleocontinent called Sahul, which encompasses present-day Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Aru Islands was settled 50,000 years ago.

And at that time, the only possible route of travel to reach that paleocontinent was across the ocean separating Sunda from Sahul.

So across the Wallacean Archipelago.

Watercraft were absolutely necessary to make that journey.

So we know that watercraft had been around for a long time.

When it comes to dugouts, much of what we know about how dugouts were used and produced in eastern North America before the widespread introduction of European iron tools comes from written accounts of the 16th-century Spanish and Portuguese invasions into southeastern North America and the 17th and 18th century incursions of the French, Dutch, and English.

One of the earliest accounts of dugout canoe production was reported by Thomas Harriet in the 16th century.

And he described the method by which Native peoples felled trees and then made dugouts, and he did this, his description was so vivid that the artist Theodore De Bry was able to make this illustration of Native peoples using fire around the base of a tree, of standing trees in order to fell those trees and then using fire along with stone hatchets and shells to hollow out the tree to make a dugout canoe.

Now, the earliest stone tool type in eastern North America that shows evidence of heavy woodworking is a tool that archaeologists call the Dalton adze.

It’s named after the site in Missouri where these tools were first identified.

These stone adzes date to the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, so about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, 11,000 to 12,000 years ago.

And that makes these tools much older than the oldest known dugouts from eastern North America, which are between 6,000 and 7,000 years old.

You can see on the stone tool on your right that there is a kind of matte polish that has a bit of a sheen to it, and that is really distinctive to woodworking.

Based on experimental studies, we have confirmed, archaeologists have confirmed more than once that that kind of polish is the result of very heavy woodworking of the sort that would be involved in felling trees or making a dugout canoe.

In addition, an analysis of 17 of these Dalton adzes that was published in 2018, they found charcoal residue that was visible with the naked eye on 11 of those stone tools.

So the charcoal was embedded in little pits in the stone.

And so that adds additional evidence to the ethnohistoric accounts of Native peoples using stone tools to make dugout canoes and to fell trees.

In the western Great Lakes, we have to be a little bit attentive to the fact that copper was also used.

Stone tool, or copper tools were made between about 8,000 and 3,000 years ago.

These would be, you know, everyday use of tools.

After 3,000 years ago, copper was used primarily to make personal ornaments and objects of ritual significance.

So there’s a possibility that the earliest dugouts in Wisconsin could have been made, at least in part, with copper tools like these adzes and spuds that are in the collections of the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Copper is a softer metal than iron, and so it may not have been as effective or quick in using it to make woodworking, to make dugout canoes.

And if these were used for woodworking, they would’ve left different kinds of marks than iron tools on dugouts.

But over time, those marks can become eroded.

And so it just makes it really critical that we obtain radiocarbon dates on every dugout in the state so that we can, you know, we can really be certain what is a historic era dugout that was made during settler colonialism versus a dugout that was made prior to the settlement, the Anglo-American settlement in Wisconsin.

To our knowledge, the earliest documented iron tools in eastern North America that are associated with Native American sites were introduced by de Soto in the Southeast in the 16th century.

But in Wisconsin and the Midwest, iron tools were not readily available until the sustained presence of the French in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Once iron tools were available, they were quickly adopted to replace stone and shell tools to hollow out a log to make a dugout.

Fire was still commonly used, but it wasn’t as essential as it was when using stone and shell tools.

For many years, the Menominee Nation had a booth at the Wisconsin State Fair where they would sometimes demonstrate dugout canoe production using metal tools.

And you can see a metal tool resting up against the dugout.

I think it’s fascinating how many wood chips there are on the floor around this dugout.

It’s not even completely hollowed out yet.

It’s just kind of a remarkable undertaking.

In the summer of 2022, Paul DeMain from the Lac Courte organized a project to build two dugouts on Madeline Island, and he involved various Ojibwe groups, local residents, and even some of the summer visitors to the island.

As with the previous dugouts, they relied on metal tools for making these.

And then in 2021 and 2022, Bill Quackenbush of the Ho-Chunk worked with their tribal youth to build a dugout canoe using metal tools and fire applied to a large cottonwood tree.

And they put that, they put that tree, or that dugout canoe into the water in the summer of 2022 and took it through the four lakes and then all the way down to Beloit.

And so this is, you know, this is the way dugouts were used in the past.

Dugouts were important for a variety of different activities in the past, just as canoes are used in a variety of different ways in the present.

They were used, dugouts were used for basic transportation on lakes and rivers by Indian people as well as early fur traders, like this father and his Mtis son with their wares in a dugout descending the Missouri River in this illustration by George Caleb Bingham.

I do wanna ask you, what’s in the front of this canoe?

[audience laughing] It looks like a black cat, right?

But it’s been chained to the front of the canoe, which is sort of curious.

It is actually a bear cub.

It is in, the wares that they’re transporting included the skin of the mama bear, and then the, you know, probably after they killed the mama bear, the baby bear came along and they’re like, “Uh-oh, “what do we do now with the poor baby bear that’s lost its mama?”

Dugouts were also used in fishing, as indicated by this hand-colored etching of a Theodore De Bry illustration.

And even whaling.

And this is an illustration by De Bry of Newfoundland, Native peoples in Newfoundland whaling in dugout canoes, which really seems to be, like, the absolutely most hazardous possible way you could use a dugout canoe.

And of course, dugouts were used for recreation by Native peoples, just as they are used today by all kinds of people for recreational use.

So with this background of dugout production and use, we’re now going to dig in, bad pun, but dig into the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project, starting with the basic goals that we outlined at the beginning, which included simply locating and identifying and then documenting dugouts from across Wisconsin, measuring and describing the dugouts so that we would be able to compare size and form of this kind of relatively rare form of material culture.

And then we also wanted to make use of modern technology to develop 3D models of each dugout to make them broadly accessible because most institutions have only one dugout in their collections.

You look at that dugout and you think, “Okay, I know what dugout canoes look like,” but it really takes the work that Tami and I have done, just traveling all over the state and even into Washington, D.C. to the Smithsonian to really realize that there’s a lot of variation in the appearance of dugouts.

In their size, their shape, their proportions.

And so we really felt that it was important to be able to make this information broadly accessible.

We’ve also been working with Forest Products Lab to determine the type of wood used to make the dugouts.

And we’ve been determining the age of the dugouts using historic records where those are available, as well as radiocarbon dates, which we have a small number of, but we will be growing that part of the database over the summer.

We’ve also been describing the condition of the dugouts, how they’re stored, how they’ve been presented to help develop a set of best practices for the institutions that curate and preserve and exhibit this form of material culture.

So next, I’m going to go through the methods we’ve used to document and describe the dugouts.

The project began with Ryan and Tami and other people in her office scouring the Wisconsin Historical Society archives, including Charles E. Brown’s careful and detailed notes on the Lake Wingra canoe, which was recovered in the late 1800s.

And Ferdinand Hotz’s photographs of Door County, including this dugout from Europe Lake that is now on exhibit at the Door County Maritime Museum.

And these provide some really, you know, very compelling evidence of the dugouts across Wisconsin.

But the work continued with scouring Wisconsin newspapers, looking for any mention of a dugout canoe.

And in some cases, like this dugout canoe that was found in Selmer Lake, we’ve been able to match it up with a dugout in an institution, in this case the Iola Historical Society.

Another example is this dugout canoe that was found in Forest County in the mid 1960s, and we’re pretty confident that it is the dugout that’s at the Fur Trade Museum at Villa Louis, even though their records indicate a different origin for their dugout.

However, if you look at the bow on both dugouts, they’re so, so similar that it really, there’s, you know, this is such a unique appearance that these are the same dugout.

And we’ll be doing some additional analyses on this dugout, the wood from this dugout, to confirm that it may have come from a tree that grew in Forest County.

However, there are a lot more newspaper accounts that mention dugout canoes where we’ve not been able to match up the newspaper account with an example in any institution or collection among any of the extant dugouts.

So we are, we think that there are probably more out there that we have yet to learn about.

Many of these early dugouts may have been destroyed, but we think that there are some that are still extant.

We’ve also reached out to institutions around the state to inquire if they had a particular dugout that we found reference to in the archives or newspaper accounts.

Sometimes we’d just, Tami would just kind of cold call and say, “Hey, do you have any dugout canoes?”

And then when they would say, “Yes, we’ve got one,” we would make arrangements to visit and document it.

And sometimes we’d get there and we’d find that they actually had three dugouts and that they just, you know, just told us about the one.

And of course, there are Tamara Thomsen’s recreational dives, where the experiences that she related earlier from working on this project helped her to recognize dugout canoes on the bottom of Lake Mendota.

Although we’ve got a larger sample size now than what’s represented on this map, and we’re working on a much better, visually more appealing map, it shows that we’ve got pretty good coverage across the state.

And that has been really important in that it allows us to start looking at geographic variation in the dugouts that we have in terms of the qualitative data, that sort of descriptive information as well as quantitative data that we’ve got analyses of.

And now I’m gonna turn back over to Tami, her turn.

– So I get the fun job of taking you on a tour of all of this, all the dugout canoes that we’ve visited in the state.

So, and tell you a little bit about the data that, that we’ve gathered on them.

One thing we went to look at is tool marks, and you can see very distinctive tool marks here that were used with metal tools for constructing mostly historic era canoes that we have looked at.

Canoes will have thwarts, or sometimes they won’t have thwarts.

So these are the cross members that you see carved into the bottom of the canoe in the Oshkosh Public Museum image here.

Sometimes these are referred to as seats in the canoe collections, but we believe that it was, they probably were not used necessarily as seats, but used maybe to push against as they were standing to give purchase on the bottom of the canoe or to divide it into sections to be able to store different cargoes aboard.

Many of the canoes have evidence of burning.

Sometimes the burning is on the inside of the canoe.

So you can see here on a couple of the photographs, the charring marks that are still shown in the center, but also we’ve noticed that there’s charring on the outside of the canoes for when they were felling the trees.

And we see that in the lower image on the right of the Menominee Logging Museum canoe.

So kind of interesting when you can find this.

It’s like a clue into the construction of the craft.

With some of the historic era canoes, We also see the presence of guide or gauge holes.

So these are holes that have been put into the canoe and plugged.

What happens is, is that they’re drilled in at certain depths, the ends of the plugs, the dowels are painted, and then as they scrape away, they’re able to determine the exact thickness of the canoe.

So this is not seen on the Native-made dugouts, but only on these historic era dugouts, which speaks to the amazing craftsmanship skills of the Native people.

For many of the canoes that we’ve looked at, symmetry makes it very difficult to determine what end is the bow and which end is the stern.

In some cases, it’s slightly larger at the stern, but ever so slightly.

But in this case, we’re able to see drag marks on the bottom of the canoe, and as such, we’re able to determine that this is the bow of the canoe, where it’d been dragged ashore.

Also, on some of the historic era canoes, we’re seeing evidence of patching, and there’s all sorts of patching that’s used to prevent your canoe from leaking.

Sometimes there’s pitch that’s been added from tree resin.

In other cases, there’s material that’s been shoved into the cracks of the canoe and put pitch over the top of it to try to get it to stop the leaking.

When there are more substantial cracks, there’s different kinds of tin patches that have been used.

So we see here tin, brass, copper, all sorts of things.

We even see in the top image here that they used the bottom of a bucket as part of the patch that they’ve nailed onto the bow of this canoe.

And about a half a dozen or so of the dugouts that we visited have been painted in some form of another.

Some of them have various layers of paint of different colors, and some have designs that have been added to them.

In the lower image, we see a combination of whites and grays, gold and black, which was probably a painted design along the gunnel of this canoe.

And this canoe is at the Chippewa Valley Historic Museum.

Two of the historic era canoes that we’ve looked at have designs that are painted on the bow.

The one on the right is going to be the Menominee Logging Museum canoe.

This is up against a wall on the outside of the building, and on the inside it’s preserved and protected a little bit against the weather, and we see this geometric shape.

And then on the image on the left, or sorry, the image on the right, we see Chief Ackley’s canoe of Mole Lake, which is on display at the Camp 5 Logging Museum.

And we see a sunburst, which has been added on the bow.

We also have a series of holes, which are sometimes unexplained.

Some of them go partially through, but not all the way through the hull.

And we’re not really sure, we’re still working on our theory as to what all the holes are.

We have various hypotheses about these.

Possibly they were used to mount a sail, or could have been used to control the sail with rigging.

We could see here in a model of a Lewis and Clark canoe that was described having a mast and used to hoist a sail and a flag.

Or possibly it could have been used to secure a blanket or a tarp to the bottom of the canoe.

As we see in this George Catlin painting, there’s a person standing at the stern of the– or the bow of the canoe, and somehow it’s fastened to the floor or held down by his foot and held up in place to create a sail as they’re going across big water.

Or maybe it was just to hold a flag, as we see here with the Ho-Chunk canoe as they used this past summer on Lake Mendota, when they were touring the four lakes and taking it down to Beloit.

So in this hand-colored etching, it shows the use of fire for night fishing.

And although it’s probably an artistic license that they have a fire built in the center of the canoe, they probably put it up on a pole or a standard and tipped it out over the water in order to create light to be able to attract the fish for fishing.

A number of the dugouts will have holes at the bow in some manner.

These are used either to daisy chain the canoes together or to tie a rope and be able to fasten the boat to shore or keep boats together in a fog.

So a lot of times, canoes also could have been used to tow various products and tow them behind.

And so several canoes were chained together.

Very infrequently are artifacts found in association with canoes, but two of them in Wisconsin, we have evidence of that.

One is the Lake Mendota canoe; number one was found with a series of net sinkers.

So all of the net sinkers were about the size of your hand and they were piled in the center.

So these must have been attached at one time to the bottom of the net to hold it in place.

And then gourds were placed across the top, and all that remains are the rocks themselves.

But there’s also a canoe that was found in Lac du Flambeau by Strawberry Island.

It’s called the Strawberry Island canoe.

And it was found with trapping artifacts associated with it.

So a number of traps and other tools that would be used by early trappers.

We’re reaching the point in our sample size now that we’re starting to see great similarities between some of the dugouts.

And this could possibly be because we’re seeing the hand of the maker.

So a number of canoes that were made by canoe makers of various tribes, or maybe there are practices that were used in and of themselves of the tribes.

You see this, the stylistic bow in a number of Menominee canoes, and we’re seeing this repeated, so we’re wondering if this is all tied together somehow.

So as far as quantitative data and categorical data, we also recorded a number of things about the canoes, including length, width, and depth of hold.

We sketched the canoes on graph paper and kept descriptive notes.

And in addition to taking wood samples from all of the canoes to help with wood identification, if they haven’t been carbon dated at the end of the summer, we’re hoping to send all of the samples in and be able to get radiocarbon dates, or a range of dates that the canoe would have been harvested in.

And then also we’re going to do stable strontium isotope analysis.

Wisconsin is geographically different enough so that we should be able to assign regions to each canoe where the canoe was harvested from.

And this will allow us to give information or provide somewhat of a history to some of the canoes that are in collections that no longer have that information associated with them.

We’ve also tried to use a number of technological advantages that we’ve had come to us.

Certainly 3D modeling is not something that’s new, but the speed and rapidity of it is really something that’s improved over the time since we started this survey.

In 2018, Ryan collected samples, or collected data sets from each one of the canoes that he visited, and he would run the photogrammetry models overnight, and sometimes it took days for the models to be created.

And now, really, with the advancements in technology, we’re able to run those in a matter of an hour or so and be able to tell whether we’re successful or whether we need to collect another data set before we go home.

We use a program called MetaShape, and we use really high-tech things like a GoPro camera to collect the images.

And so you can see, this is kind of the output of what the canoe would look like, the canoe model would look like.

And again, we can get a model to be output in about a couple of hours.

Also, an advancement in the technology is iPhones.

So many of you probably have ’em in your pockets right now.

And the iPhone 12, 13, and 14 Pro models all have embedded in them a little LiDAR scanner.

And so with an app called Scaniverse is able to collect, in a matter of 15 minutes, all of the data that she needs to be able to create a model.

This is actually taken in the Smithsonian.

This is a Menominee canoe that is there.

And so we’re in an outbuilding of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, and she’s able to collect enough data to be able to create a model of the canoe.

So then in a matter of a couple seconds, she can output this into a video format and we’re able to share this in an MP4 video, which can be shared on many social media outlets.

So both the photogrammetry and the Scaniverse 3D models then can be uploaded to a website called Sketchfab, and users can then spin it around themselves and manipulate the model, zoom in where they want to see various features.

And also, I mean, you can really see that in a lot of cases, there’s a good resolution that can be seen in this.

You can actually see the grain of the wood.

Also, these models then can be sent to a program called Mesh Lab, and that will render the scaled model, and it can also be printed with a 3D printer.

And then these models can be used in educational programming.

Okay, I’ll pass it back to Sissel and get a little sip of water.

– So we are still actively collecting data for this project, but we do have some preliminary results that we’d like to share with you.

And those relate to the size of dugouts, the kinds of wood that they were made of, and their age.

The intact dugouts that we’ve looked at have ranged in size from about two and a quarter meters in length to eleven, just over 11 meters in length, but most of them fall within a range between three and five meters in length.

We’ve got a few working hypotheses about dugout length.

One is that the length might relate to how the dugout was used.

A second is that dugouts may have varied in size through time, although the evidence that we have at this point would not seem to support that hypothesis.

And then a third is that maybe the size of the dugout is related to the kind of water on which the dugout was used, perhaps with shorter dugouts being used on smaller inland lakes and larger or longer dugouts being used on big river and big water.

The shortest intact dugout in our sample is the Lake Mendota dugout number three, shown here, which is two and a quarter meters in length and about 2,000 years old.

This dugout is in pretty poor condition.

I think Tami describes it as feeling like wet cardboard.

So it’s not something that could be feasibly raised from the bottom of the lake.

So it remains on the bottom of Lake Mendota.

The longest dugout in our sample is 11 meters in length and it’s at the Sawyer County Historical Society in Hayward.

And the story they have about this dugout was that it was used about 150 years ago by a trapper named Davidson to transport supplies on the river from Chippewa Falls northward.

And just a little aside about this, this is, the building was basically built around this dugout, and then the building was in one part of Hayward and it was moved across the road at some point, and they had to, you know, they had to move the dugout within the building.

It just is, it’s so massive.

In the 17th century, the French fur trader Louis Jolliet commented about a Peoria village that they encountered near the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Des Moines River.

And they described 300 cabins in this community and 180 canoes that were kind of beached on the river here.

And those canoes were 50 feet in length, or 15.2 meters in length, so much longer than any of the canoes in our sample, which are mostly like one-third the size of this.

So this provides some possible historic evidence that longer dugouts were used on big water and for river travel.

Now some of the, turning our attention to wood type, this is some of the funnest stuff I think that we have found in this project.

If we look at wood type that has been determined for dugout canoes across eastern North America, with the exception of Wisconsin, there are 174 dugouts for which wood type has been reliably determined.

And 92% of these dugouts are made out of softwoods, which are more easily worked with stone tools and fire than hardwoods.

And they’re also relatively light in weight and rot-resistant.

Pine in particular and many other softwoods contain a resin that facilitates the burning process that’s used for hollowing out the dugouts.

So it, you know, seems to make a lot of sense, and this is kind of conventional wisdom that pine or cypress would be preferred materials for making dugout canoes.

However, the samples that we’ve had analyzed so far at Forest Products Lab, we’ve looked, we’ve had them look at 39 samples.

And roughly two thirds are made out of softwoods and a fully one third are made out of hardwoods.

So the softwoods that have been identified are white pine, hemlock, and spruce.

And the hardwoods that have been identified include white oak, elm, butternut, and hickory.

And this makes the Wisconsin assemblage of dugout canoes really stand out as unique with regard to the wood types in terms of diversity of wood that was used as well as the greater, the significantly greater representation of hardwoods.

Now, elm has been one of the, sort of, was one of the puzzling discoveries because most people that we’ve talked to that have any knowledge about wood say, “Oh, you could never make a dugout out of elm “because it doesn’t split easily.

It’s got this weird cross-knit grain to it.”

But when we look at the locations of dugouts plotted on a map of the 19th century public land survey data on witness trees, we will see that there’s a correlation between the type of wood that a dugout was made out of and where in the state it’s located.

So most of the white pine dugouts come from the northern part of the state or along Lake Michigan where the soil, the sandy soils make a suitable habitat for pine trees.

Most of the… All of the white oak and most of the hardwood dugouts come from southern Wisconsin, the southern part of the state, which was, you know, characterized mostly by hardwoods, particularly oak savanna at the time of the public land survey.

There’s one hemlock dugout on the Menominee reservation and one hickory dugout on the Menominee reservation.

And this is, this kind of sets up some interesting things about Native ingenuity and persistence.

So the Menominee have reported that the wood that they would prefer to use to make dugouts is butternut.

And we don’t have an age for the hickory dugout, which is closely related to butternut, but the hemlock canoe from the Menominee reservation dates to the latter half of the 19th century.

So this is a time when most of the white pine had been logged off of the Menominee reservation and probably most of the butternut had been logged off as well.

And that left limited choices in the wood that was available to make dugout canoes out of.

And hemlock was a tree species that was left standing when the land was logged over.

Now, back to the sort of question about white oak and elm.

And all of the elm, the dugouts that have been identified as being made of elm come from Lake Mendota, and they date between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago when the climate was significantly drier and warmer.

And we know this, we know there was, that this climate change led to a change in the vegetation.

This is based on analyses of sediment cores, lake bottom sediment cores from Lake Mendota that were done in the 1980s.

And so in this time period between, it was actually between about I think 6,000, 3,000 and 6,000 years ago, the climate was such that oak trees were not growing in closed canopy forests.

They were growing in a more open oak savanna environment.

And under those conditions, oak begins to branch fairly low to the ground.

And so the oak was not a suitable form for making a dugout canoe.

Whereas elm, even though it’s much harder to work, elm grows tall, whether it is in a closed canopy forest or a more open environment.

And so it would be, that long, straight trunk would be really well-suited to making dugout canoes.

So far, we’ve got radiocarbon dates for 16 of the dugouts and historically documented dates for three of the dugouts, and these dugouts range from about 4,000 years ago to about 80 years ago, although we think that that date is anomalous.

We will be obtaining more dates, hopefully by the end of the summer, to fill in some of these gaps, and we hope it will fill in some of those gaps in the area of the older part of the dugout canoes.

So what have we learned?

What are, you know, what have we learned at least so far?

Well, there are a lot more dugouts from Wisconsin than we expected or anticipated when we started this.

It really quickly grew to be much more than an undergraduate senior thesis project.

And that’s part of the reason that Tami and I have continued on with it.

Advances in technology, including advances over the last five years, have allowed us to more quickly produce 3D models.

And this is really, this is important because we can more readily calculate carrying capacity of these dugouts from a 3D model than trying to do all of the measurements and calculate it out ourselves.

We can take measurements off the 3D models, and the 3D models that we publish, that we make available, other people can also take measurements off of those dugouts and then, you know, do their own kinds of analyses, explore questions we haven’t considered.

And of course, the 3D models make the dugouts much more accessible to a broader audience.

What this has been, we still aren’t quite sure how to deal with this, but sometimes photogrammetry works much better on a dugout than LiDAR, and other times, the LiDAR works much better than the photogrammetry.

And I don’t know if we have a single dugout where we’ve got a beautiful photogrammetry model and a beautiful LiDAR model.

There just seem to be some things that work better with the photographs and some that work better with the scanning.

Dugout length varies significantly.

And this might be related to the kind of water on which the dugouts were used, rivers versus inland lakes.

Dugouts were typically made out of locally available wood.

And it makes a lot of sense when we think about that.

But it doesn’t align with the conventional wisdom about dugouts being preferentially made out of pine or cypress in the Southeast.

And the range of wood taxa or tree taxa that were used to make dugouts by Native peoples in Wisconsin is quite wide, quite broad ranging, much more so than what archaeologists and anthropologists have typically thought.

And so this just shows us that the choices that people made in the past did not get constrained by the kinds of things that we think of from our Western perspective today would be major constraints.

Dugouts have a wider range of dates than we ever expected.

I have to say, when Tami first found the first dugout in Lake Mendota and brought up a wood sample that they had, that the Wisconsin Historical Society had dated, you know, we were all, I think thinking, “Oh, maybe it’s 500 years old or…” And then it came out 1,200 years old, and then as she found more dugouts, they turned out to be even older.

So this is really kind of exciting for us with the… And the oldest dugout that we currently have in our sample is 4,000 calendar years old.

Another kind of important message that we wanna get out is that even a fragment of a dugout tells a story.

We can look at wood type and that can be really informative.

These are two dugouts from the southern part of the state that were both made out of white oak.

They’re just fragments.

We can also add to our knowledge of climate history by looking at the tree rings in some of these dugouts.

And the one on the lower right from Lake Delavan, Evan Larson from UW-Platteville is working on doing a cross section to look at tree ring width and correlate that with climate conditions in the past.

So even a fragment of a dugout has research value.

It might not be as exhibit-worthy as a complete dugout, but it still contains really important information.

So what’s con-next for us?

We’ve got so many canoe puns that it is… People are starting to groan about them.

First, we’re gonna continue our efforts to visit the dugouts so that we can document the remaining dugouts that we have, this, you know, the total of 70 that we know of so far.

We’ll be searching for dugouts that have been reported as being underwater.

That’s something we will be doing this summer.

We’ll be finishing up wood identifications on the full sample so that we can really, really talk about the full range of different types of wood that were used.

We’ll be getting radiocarbon dates on all of the undated dugouts, and we’ll be redating a couple of the dugouts that have dates that we think are anomalous, and those are dugouts that have been shellacked or otherwise treated in ways that could have compromised a radiocarbon date if you didn’t, weren’t aware that the dugout had been treated.

We’ll be conducting stable strontium isotope analysis to determine the region within the state from which the trees came that were used to make these dugouts.

And this kind of work, the radiocarbon dates and strontium isotope analysis are fairly expensive undertakings, but we’ve got funding from the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, from the Fall Competition Award, and a Vilas Mid-Career Research award that will cover the costs of this.

And we still have a National Science Foundation grant proposal that is under review and pending that we should hear about later this month.

This is a project that would not have been possible without the participation and enthusiastic cooperation of so many people and the institutions where they work.

We’re really so grateful for our tribal partners, our institutional partners, as well as people who’ve just had an interest in this project and maybe had a dugout in their personal collections.

So thank you.

If you’ve got a dugout to report, please contact the statearcheologist@ wisconsinhistory.org.

It might already be in our sample, but it might not be.

We would love to know about more dugout canoes.

And if you’d like to learn more about this project, you can visit my website, schroeder.labs.wisc.edu.

Thank you very much.

[audience applauding]