University Place

The Lake Mendota Dugout Canoe Discovery

– Welcome everyone to this special Friday night edition of Wednesday Nite @ the Lab; I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension, Wisconsin 4-H, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, University Place, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to this special Friday night edition of Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this once a year as part of UW-Madison’s Science Expeditions Campus Open House. We do Wednesday Nite @ the Lab 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you the state archeologist of the state of Wisconsin here at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Jim Skibo, who will introduce the panel. Would you please join me in welcoming Jim Skibo to this special edition? [audience applauding]

– Thank you, Tom. Well, tonight we’re gonna talk about the discovery, the recovery, the preservation, and the ongoing research on the Mendota canoe that was discovered this past summer and we brought out in November. It’s the oldest intact dugout canoe in Wisconsin, and it’s the only one found with associated artifacts, and it’s the only one found in deeper water, and we’ll be talking about that. And this is the crew that did all this.

And I’m gonna introduce Tamara Thomsen first of all. She’s a hall of fame diver and a maritime archeologist, and Caitlin Zant, maritime archeologist, and Amy Rosebrough, the above-water archeologist, like I am. [all laughing] And so we’re gonna take you through it. There’ll be time for questions at the end. It’s nice of y’all to come out on this beautiful spring day, and we’ll have some fun.

– Tamara: So it starts with me. So this was, imagine back to June of last summer. Do you remember when it wasn’t snowing? And it was such a lovely day. It was June 11th, and it was one of the first weekends that I had had off in a while, and really, what does an underwater archeologist do on her day off? I go underwater and spend more time. So I grabbed one of the girls from the dive shop.

This is Mallory Dragt, she was manager of the dive shop, and I asked her if she wanted to go for just a recreational dive in our local lake. And we went out to a very popular dive site off of Shorewood Hills. There’s a mooring field that’s there off McKenna Park, and it’s a really beautiful place to dive. You can snorkel out and then drop down, and the bottom slopes to about 15 feet, and then it drops off down a wall to about 35 feet. And our plan was to take these diver propulsion vehicles like she has here, which are basically a fan with a big battery pack, and we were gonna fly down the wall there. There’s a lot of fish that congregate along the wall, and our intention was just to chase fish and pick up trash and kill time. And so we set out on our dive, and we got to the turnaround pressure that she had in her tank, and she signaled to me, “It’s time to turn around,” and where she stopped, she stopped right above the exposed end of a dugout canoe. So I got out of my pocket my Rite in the Rain notebook, and I wrote, “dugout canoe,” and she went, “Yeah, okay, let’s turn around and go back, it’s time.” And so I made a note about what the depth was that we were at, we were at 27 feet of water, and about how long it took us to get back to the boat. And I thought, you know, we can re-find this again and make sure that it’s actually a dugout canoe, and it’s not just a log that kinda looks like a dugout canoe.

And so I asked her if she wanted to grab another tank and maybe we could go find it, but she had other plans. Her boyfriend was in town, and he had a basketball game she wanted to attend. So yeah, I remember being 24. [laughs] But so she couldn’t come, so I gave Amy Rosebrough a call. I figured maybe she had some time and she could come sit on the boat with me. And so Amy dreads picking this outfit out to come out, but—

– Jim: Nice shorts, nice shorts.

– Tamara: Yeah, exactly. [all laughing] And so she came out and sat on the boat, and took us about a half an hour to re-find the canoe. And this time I had brought a tape with me, a measuring tape, and then I’d also brought a camera, so an underwater camera, because I figured I could take some pictures and bring ’em up and share ’em with Amy and get her opinion on what this thing was. And so we, I started bringing up pictures, and this is what it looked like with the tape stretched out over it.

It’s about 15 1/2 feet long. I asked Amy whether she thought that I should clean out, if it was okay if I cleaned out around the edges, because I wanted to make sure it was a whole canoe and not just a piece of a canoe. So I started fanning off around the edges just slightly, and yeah, it turned out to be the whole canoe down there. And then she asked, “Is there any artifacts that you found associated with it?” And I said, you know, “No, I didn’t really see anything. All I saw was this weird pile of rocks.” And she said, “Well, can you bring ’em up?” And I said, “Sure.” So I gathered them all up, and I brought ’em up to the boat, and she photographed them and took some measurements of them. And I said, “What do you think?” And she said, “I don’t know.” So she said, “Just take ’em back down.” I took them back down, and she thought about it overnight, and she decided that they were probably net sinkers that were associated with a net that had been in the canoe.

And we marked where the location was so that we could find it again, and Amy cataloged it as an archeological site with the state. And then we covered it back up and waited for information on what we should do next, whether we should leave it alone or whether we should bring it up. And then we, about this time, John Broihahn had retired and Jim was hired in, and so we waited. So how did, kind of an aside to step back here is that how did I know this was a dugout canoe? We had had a student that was named Ryan Smazal, or she is named Ryan Smazal, and he was trying to do his senior thesis project, and he came to us for some project ideas. So a few years ago, his project was to go around the state and look at all of the dugout canoes that are in collections, either private or held by historical societies or museums, sometimes some of ’em are above bars, and to sort of get a comparative analysis of what all of the different canoes look like. And so, yeah, Caitlin and I drove around with him, and we saw a lotta canoes. So there were like 34, I think, that we looked at and in various conditions, and so I kinda had an idea of what I was looking at. But it’s kind of one of those things that you, if you believe in fate, there were a lot of things that came together, to know what a dugout canoe looked like and to stumble across one on the bottom. So then the next step was figuring out how old it was. So go ahead, Jim.

– Yeah, and I arrived in July, and at our weekly unit meetings, we had a lot to talk about, and occasionally they would mention this dugout canoe. And after a few weeks, I said, “Well, tell me more about this dugout canoe.” And so they showed me some pictures, and yeah, it looked like a dugout canoe, but I was very skeptical because I’m skeptical, basically. [audience laughs] Because it would be unusual for wood to survive this long in a lake, in a freshwater lake, if it was a really old canoe. So I was wondering, “Did Boy Scouts make this in the 1950s or something?” ‘Cause they do such things, and you know, archeologists don’t like to be fooled, but we do have carbon-14 dating. So we said, “Let’s go down and get a little piece,” like a hair-like piece of the canoe, it’s all it takes, and I send it in for carbon-14 dating. So Tami and I went out one late summer day, and she went back to where the canoe was, but you know, Lake Mendota in the summer and the fall, the visibility is very low. And this is one of the great things about our divers, that they did all this work with very little visibility. And I knew that was a problem because we had the GPS, and the area was about as big as this stage where the canoe was, and I was in the boat and I could see Tami’s bubbles going back and forth and back and forth, and also she buried it. So it was kind of a problem, but she found it, and she brought up a little piece.

I sent it to a place called Beta Analytic, and we got a carbon-14 date, and it dated to, the number on top is just the number of the sample, and the number on the bottom is the one that is most easy to understand. So it dates to about AD 800, so it’s about 1,200 years old. If you’re curious about the number above, this is the way radiocarbon dating people talk. It’s 1180-1058 BP. BP for them means before 1950, because that’s when radiocarbon dating was invented, and so for some reason that’s their standard. So if you, it’s the same date in the Christian calendar. So that’s old, and I was skeptical no more. Also the fact that it had net sinkers in it was a clue that it was something significant. So I went into the State Historic Preservation Officer, our supervisor, Daina Penkiunas, and I said, “You know, the canoe dates to AD 800,” and she, you know, sort of screamed, and I sent emails and texts to everybody, and she said, “We should go see Christian Overland, the director of the Wisconsin Historical Society and tell him about this.” So we went down to his office, and he was really surprised.

And he said, “Do you think it’s significant?” I said, “Yeah, it’s the only one with artifacts. It’s in deep water, it’s old, it’s the oldest intact canoe in Wisconsin.” And he said, “What do you think we should do?” I said, “Well, you know, it’s near the surface now. The reason why it’s probably preserved is that it’s been underground for 1,200 years, and now it’s close to the surface, and it will soon be gone. Maybe by next spring it’ll be gone, or it’ll move and we can’t find it again.” And so he said, “What do you recommend?” I said, “I think we should take it out.” And he said, “Do you know how to do this?” And I said, “Yes.” I had no idea. [audience laughing] But one thing I didn’t mention is just by happy coincidence, if I had to pick three other people to be a part of this, it would’ve been these three. We fit together perfectly on this.

And so, and Christian, to his credit said, “This is a Rosa Parks moment for us,” ’cause he was at the, which makes no sense outta context, but it’s. . . [audience laughs] He was with the Henry Ford Museum, and they purchased, and they spent a lotta money for the bus that Rosa Parks sat down in, and it was a big thing and made a lotta press. And he said, “I think this is gonna be the Rosa Parks moment.” And again, I’m a little more skeptical. I said, “Well, yeah, yeah, okay, maybe it will be,” and it turns out it really was. The whole museum pulled together on this, and we worked then for six weeks to come up with, we had six weeks to come up with a plan, and we worked tirelessly. And I’ll let someone else talk now.

– Tamara: So yeah, he committed us to this, and we had no idea what we were doing, so we had a lot of learning to do. And we happened to be able to put together a really good, a really good team of people and also to harness the expertise of a lot of people that we were familiar with. So my first stop was calling Dr. Dick Boyd. Dick Boyd owned Global Manufacturing Company out of Milwaukee, so out of the West Allis area, and he was recently retired, and Dick is more well-known really for being one of the early divers of the state. But he did the excavation, the raising of the Alvin Clark in the 1960s, so I knew that he knew the business end of a dredge. So I asked him, I said, “What do you know about dredging operations? We have this dugout canoe. We were gonna try to dredge around it, we want to. . .” At that point, we had decided we were gonna save all of the sediment that was surrounding it to see if there were any artifacts that had been missed.

And he sent me this drawing of, from a book of what I should build. Well, this made no sense to me. And yeah, so I thought, “Well, okay, I’m not gonna be able to put this together.” So I started looking through some things that had been dropped off by another diver named Kimm Stabelfeldt. He had been cleaning out his house. I think it was his wife had appointed him to clean out a garage, and he dropped off a water lift or a water dredge. And so we were gonna do this airlift to bring up the sediment, and Amy and I went out and practiced with it, and it was unsuccessful. So we had, it was, you know, it would be too slow. It was going to consume all sorts of air. So it was back to the drawing board.

So I took this photo, and I sent it to a commercial diver in the Manitowoc area named Randy Wallander, and he said, “You know, I have one of those dredges. I just acquired it from a gold digging operation in Alaska.” And he said, “If you wanna come and pick it up,” he said, “I got it.” I think he got it from eBay or something. It was cheap, you know? [Jim laughing] And he said, “You can come use it for a week and see if this is what you want.” So we took it out and we practiced with it, and it seemed to work okay, and we decided that we were gonna use the water dredge to lift with and to lift the sediment up to the surface. Randy also, after talking to him, we didn’t know really how heavy the canoe was gonna be or what it was gonna take to lift it. So he devised this plan for us to put it into a sling, sort of a hammock, and to be able to lift it along these bars along the edges of it so that it wouldn’t crack the canoe or squish it as we were lifting, if we lifted it one end over the other. He also had a series of lift bags and other compressors and items that he could bring. So, you know, we told him, “Yes, you can volunteer and bring all that stuff to the lift day and help us out,” and he was super excited to join in.

And then we needed manpower. And so I had been doing some training for the Dane County Sheriff Department dive team and the deputies that worked there, and I asked them, well, I tried to convince them to come and help us because I was, I said, “Wouldn’t you like to learn how to use a dredge? You never know where you’re gonna need to use this on a crime scene.” And so we practiced with that water dredge, or the airlift dredge at first, and it just wasn’t going really well. And so they were not so enthusiastic about dredging, but they said that they would help us with the lift. And so Jim convinced the sheriff to let the deputies come with us. However, it seemed almost impossible to get them together to join us on any day except for a registered training day with them. Most of them work in the prisons. And so, and a lot of them work third shift. So trying to get them in at an earlier time was just too complicated for their scheduling. So we decided that, well, we’ll have to go with what we got. And at that point, their last scheduled dive day of the season was November 2nd, and then so from there, we decided Caitlin and I would have to do most of the dredging. We could see if we could get some of the volunteer divers that had worked with us during the season to come help out, but it was gonna be on us.

– Yep, so at this point, we’re nearing the end of October, and the one day that we had scheduled was November 2nd. So we basically had about a week and a half to figure all this out and get the canoe dredged. We hoped that we could do it in that timeframe. So we, again, like Tami said, we reached out to our volunteers who had come out with us that past season. And luckily besides Randy, we had two of them accept and come able to help us. So we went out the week before the lift day and went to the site, and again, re-found it. We put in a mooring buoy at the site so that every day when we went back out to it, we didn’t have to re-find it every single day and then potentially damage the canoe in some way as we were trying to drop anchor or something like that. So we were lucky to have our volunteer Chris Spoo come out with us that day.

He helped us re-find it, helped to put in the mooring buoy, and then he also helped in the initial recovery of the net sinkers as well. And here you can see him coming up out of the water with that. After Chris was only able to come down to us for one day, so the rest of the time, we were able to have our very long-time volunteer Russ Leitz, who is 80 years old, come out with us. And he’s been a volunteer for the Historical Society, the maritime archeology office, for almost since its inception, so close to 30 years now. And Russ is just a powerhouse of a diver. We had about four days to get this dredging done, and I would say maybe about 75% of the dredging, 70% to 75% was done by Russ. So it was great to have him along, and he just went underwater and worked. And so without the help of those two volunteers, we definitely would not have been able to get this done in that timeframe. So we went out and we started to dredge. We had everything set up with this beautiful, lovely water pump, and we started dredging, and day one seemed to start okay.

We decided that we were going to sift through any of the sediment that was coming up to identify any artifacts that might be around the canoe. We didn’t really know how much the sediment had been moving, and we didn’t wanna miss any important artifacts. So we had Amy and Jim out with us on the boat, and they sifted through all of the sediment that came up day one. Unfortunately, that process was fraught with issues. The sediment got stuck in the dredge pump at various points in time. It was very slow, and the water pipes, basically, or the water hoses burst 10 times throughout the course of this project. Nobody stayed dry during this project at all. So we went through this, but after—

– Jim: And the boat started on fire.

– Caitlin: The boat did start on fire as well, but we’re fine. [audience laughing] It’s fine, it was fine, it was mostly fine.

– Jim: [laughing] Small fire.

– Caitlin: It was just a small fire, it was fine. But so yeah, after the end of day one, we didn’t really identify any artifacts coming up, so we decided to scrap that idea because it was just causing a lotta issues. So from that point on, we just, we used the dredge but then offloaded all of the dredge spoil off to the side of the canoe instead of on it. So as we were doing this dredging, we were able to identify some larger pieces of wood, so if the shallower end of the canoe was a little bit more degraded than the rest of the canoe. And so near that end, we actually identified multiple larger pieces of wood that were not connected to the canoe. And Jim basically said, “Pull up anything that’s wood.” And so we did; we brought up anything that was wood. And here in this image, you can see Jim holding one of those pieces. And once we brought them up and started looking at them, we realized that these were more than likely the opposite end, that degraded end of the canoe that had broken off, and they still happened to be very close to that end of the canoe, which was really fortunate.

And if you think about it, kinda crazy in a sense. But we collected all of these scattered pieces, brought them up, and then continued with our dredging. And on the last day, we had to kinda pop the canoe out of its placement. And so it was basically suctioned down to the clay substrate that’s at the bottom of Lake Mendota. And so we also were gifted with this lovely water jet, which Tami had a lotta fun with on the last day. So we were able to go, Tami took the water jet and just was able to kind of punch out that last little line of clay that was at the bottom and actually get the canoe loose. One of the things we initially or immediately realized was how much lighter the canoe was in the water than we thought it was going to be. So this is Thursday, our day of, you know, raising the canoe was the following Tuesday, and Halloween weekend was in the middle. So we had to figure out a way to make sure that the canoe didn’t drift off somewhere, because it was a lot lighter than we thought, over the course of the weekend. So we were able to figure out a way that we could tie the canoe down without damaging it so that it would remain in place until the following week.

Fast-forward to the following week, we have our lift day, November 2nd. And the day before, Randy had come down, worked with us. We actually, he and Tami got in the water and moved the canoe onto the cradle that it was going to be in for its raise. So then on the morning of November 2nd, we were ready to go. It was below freezing, and everybody was excited. [audience laughs] We had a whole cavalcade of people out with us that day. We had four different boats. We had the Dawn Treader, which is the historical society’s 1920 or 19, or 21-foot 1973 Boston Whaler. We had another local historian and then our volunteer Russ Leitz out with us on a different boat. Then we had the Dane County Sheriff’s boat and then also a film crew on a pontoon boat.

So once we got to the site, the Dane County Sheriff’s divers were going to assist in the lift. So we got four of them in the water and then Tami and Randy as well. They went down, and the first step was to actually rotate the canoe so it was no longer on this slope. And so that way, when the canoe started to come up out of the water, it was flat, and then we wouldn’t potentially lose the canoe as it was coming up out of the water. So they went down and were successfully able to do that and rig up all of the lift bags, and then the lifting process began. Filling those lift bags with air, they were, it was slowly brought to the surface to not damage the canoe at all. Once it got to the surface, there had to be a couple of adjustments done, and then it was swam over to the boats, where the final adjustments were made. Everything was set and ready to go, and then it was transferred over to the sheriff’s department boat. The sheriff’s department boat had a little bit more leeway with its speed, and so we attached it to the back of their towing bit and also put a diver in the water. So one of the Dane County Sheriff’s divers was in the water with the canoe just to make sure that everything was okay, and then we started our trek at less than one mile an hour back to the beach.

And so it took about an hour and a half for us to get close to shore. Once we got closer to shore, the diver in the water did inform us that the canoe was about to touch bottom, and so we had to stop and readjust again. But then we continued our trek in, and along the way, we had Tami and Jim in the Dawn Treader leading the way to make sure that we were taking the correct path or the best path to get in close to shore. And once we got in close to shore, then from there, the divers ended up swimming the rest of the way in and then eventually carrying it.

– Meanwhile, being a terrestrial archeologist, or a land archeologist, they thought I’d just be hideously in the way. So they assigned me the task of standing on the beach and keeping some of the press occupied all morning. So again, very cold, so we bundled up. We had Sophie here who was helping with the maritime program at the time. So she helped take some of the press off my hands, and we thought it would be a nice, relaxing morning initially talking to some of the press and keeping an eye on the boats as they were getting in. My main concern was the canoe.

The people out on the boats, we were connected by text, but they were far away, so all you could see were these little white dots floating and circling on the water and more immediately, Tami had convinced me that I needed to get into a dry suit later on in the day to wade out into the water and help them. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a dry suit, but it’s like being born again. There’s a lot of squeezing going on. So this was concerning me for a while. So it was a cold but beautiful morning, the press came out. We started doing interviews, and when the interviews were over, I started looking around and realized, there are more people in this park than I thought there would be. So some of the Society members came out because they wanted to see, they were curious. We’ve got Christian Overland here, who’s our director and had authorized this project. The tribes sent representatives. So Bill Quackenbush with the Ho-Chunk Nation came down, started offering coffee and donuts to everybody, and then dog walkers, they’d come in.

“Why are these cameras here? Why are these people here? “’Cause, oh, we’re about to bring a 1,200-year-old canoe to shore.” “Oh really?” And then phones coming out and then Facebook and then Twitter and phone calls, and people just began to gather and gather and gather. And the next thing I knew, they said, “Amy, would you like to talk to the mayor?” And I’m going to say that I was very frozen by this point, ’cause that’s going to explain why my response was, “What mayor?” [audience laughing] “Oh, the mayor, yes, so sure, I’ll talk.” And a quick conversation with her about the logistics of getting the canoe all the way back across town to our preservation facility. Suddenly she’s on the phone then to the city police, and now cops are converging on all directions because they wanna be the escort for a 1,200-year-old canoe across town. So when this bunch arrived back to shore, they had a heck of a crowd waiting for them, including a lot of police officers. [audience chuckling] It was an amazing experience to stand on shore. We were, again, we were in text contact, and we got the text that they were coming back, and I looked up and all the boats out there, that little flotilla, turned in unison slowly, pointing directly at us.

– Caitlin: We didn’t plan that.

– Amy: They couldn’t have done it better. I mean, shivers, it wasn’t just the cold; shivers were going down my spine at that point, so.

– We made this story sound really easy, that hour and a half over, but it was stressful ’cause the waves came up and the canoe was bouncing around, and I thought, “Oh, what if it goes to the bottom right now?” But it didn’t, and so when it hit about four feet of water, we walked out and carried it in. And you know, I’ve discovered a lot of things. I’ve been doing archeology for a long time, and some very significant, but I’ve never done something so public as this, and as the people’s archeologist, that’s one of the things that we need to do. And we didn’t realize a crowd had formed. We were so busy concentrating on what we were doing. And it was, you could feel it, though, when you came on shore, you know, who was there that day? Was anybody there? John Broihahn was there. [laughs] Well, people clapped, people cried, people cheered. It was sort of amazing, you know, you get jaded as an archeologist after a while, and you just realize, and maybe, you know, I learned that day that, you know, if you involve people and it’s more public, it’s a big experience. So it was a big deal, and I’ll never forget it.

One thing I forgot to mention at the outset, before we started the process of designing a plan to extract the canoe, we contacted all the tribes in Wisconsin and told them what we’d like to do. We’d asked for their comment, and it was positive, and especially Bill Quackenbush, the Ho-Chunk who continues to be involved in all aspects of it. And there he is with the director, Christian, and as Amy mentioned, he bought donuts for everybody, ’cause it lasted a lot longer than people thought. And I don’t know how long we were out there, four hours or five hours or something.

– Tami: It was longer than that.

– Jim: And so it’s onshore, we’re excited, but now, you know, you have to have a group shot. There’s the divers and one of the volunteers, and you know, the divers were really thrilled to be a part of this as well. And so it was a cool, it was a cool day, cold. And little did I know, I mean, this is in part because of our good communication team here at the Wisconsin Historical Society, but it became big news, and it turns out Christian was right, it was a Rosa Parks moment. And by the end of the next day, the story had been in The Guardian in London, had been in the Australian papers, had been in the Japanese papers.

We were on CNN and other channels, and it was a big deal. And this is just a picture of the woman from the BBC show Time Team. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s an archeology show, and they had a December show to pick the top 10 archeological discoveries in the world, and they picked the Mendota canoe as one of them, kind of amazing. I was at the Society for American Archeology meetings last weekend in Chicago with 5,000 of my best friends, the archeologists from North America mostly, and they were all really mad about that, that I found this, we found this. [audience laughing] Like, “What about, I found footprints in New Mexico that are 23,000 years old.” And I said, “Mmm.” [audience laughing] “We got a canoe.” And it was also a little nerve-racking to go across, I thanked the mayor later, who has come and seen the canoe, for the police escort, and I said, “It’s not because the roads in Madison are bumpy, but I was a little nervous.” And I negotiated with the DNR. I said, “Can we put somebody in? We just spent all this time and energy. If this thing smashes in the thing,” but no, they wouldn’t. So they went like five miles an hour with lights flashing, and it was, must have been kind of dramatic. Well, I’m gonna talk a little bit about the preservation process, and it’s not just bringing out, then what do you do? And we had to do a lotta research, and Scott Roller and the collections people have stepped up here, and Christian said, “You could spend all the money you want on this. You need to build a vat.” This is a vat for the canoe. I said, “Great.” I called all these carpenters, I said, “Can you work this week and build a vat?” [laughs] And they’re like, “Are you crazy? We could do it in six weeks or two months.” So Scott Roller and I built this vat from a picture that Dr. Fix from the university of, from Texas A&M who preserves canoes, because it has to lie in the water for 2 1/2 years during the preservation process. So we had to build a watertight vat.

And we lined it with a pond, couple layers of pond liner. Here you see Tami and Caitlin putting the pond liner in. And somebody already mentioned this film crew, kind of amazing, again, the museum stepped up, and in our meetings even, going up to for six weeks, our Zoom meetings, they were filming it. This is the Purple Onion film team from Milwaukee, and they were just here two weeks ago or so, and they continue to do it. So things that I wouldn’t have expected were certainly captured on video. Here we are, and we also came up a plan, there’s Scott Roller in the far right, too. ‘Cause we thought it could be a thousand pounds. What if it’s a thousand pounds? So we had come up with a plan for that. Turns out it was 260 pounds. With the plank, it’s 300 pounds.

It’s still heavy, but something that people can lift, so that, we were thankful about that. And you see that one end is wrapped. That’s the fragile end that was cracking, and we’ll show you that in a little bit. That was wrapped underwater; the sand’s still in it. And so we lowered it down into the vat, kinda like you’d lower down a coffin in the Old West, and it went really well. And then it has been lying in water up until last week, and we pulled it out again, and this was a big deal, and very difficult, and we had, [laughs] how do we get this thing out now? And we had to clean it, so we worked all morning picking out the little pieces of shell and sand to get it as clean as possible, and then we scanned it. This is Lennon Rodgers. He’s from the College of Engineering and a laboratory there, that they do this kind of work for people on campus. So we did a 3D scan of it, and that went really well. Again, they’re still being filmed.

It’s fun to do the scan. You get these real-time images of the canoe. We’re scanning it because for the next 2 1/2 years, it’s not gonna be out of the water, and so we want to do some research about how it’s constructed, how, you know, the metrical properties and all kinds of things so we can have a scan of it. And believe it or not, Lennon took these with his iPhone. I mean, it’s, the iPhone 13 now is remarkable, and these are tremendous images. And I’m gonna stand up for one second and show you something that just happened today. When you do a 3D image in this laboratory, you could then do a 3D printing. And this is this part of the canoe with a hole in it that he printed out just to see if it would work. But this has all kinds of possibilities, you know? And we’re hoping that they have the capacity to print out a full-size canoe. And it’s at such great resolution that you could see the tool marks and the…

And so we could continue to study it now as it’s underwater, because we’ll have this perfect replica. The way that wood like this is preserved is by using a process called polyethylene glycol, or PEG. PEG is a wax-like material that is gradually introduced into the water. The canoe’s now sitting in a purified water, and there’s a cleansing system getting rid of the gunk and killing any living organisms. And then the PEG is added gradually, and that’ll start in about two weeks. On the upper left, that’s what the cellular structure looks like in a water log. If you didn’t put the PEG in, that’s what it’d look like on the right. It would, the only thing holding the canoe together right now is the water in the cells.

So we have to take the water out, put something else in, and that’s what we’re doing with the PEG. And so after 2 1/2 years, it’ll be sent to Texas A&M to be freeze-dried, and the remaining water will be removed. And then we could display it and move it and, you know, work with it without fear of it breaking down. And look who came to visit? The canoe was a big deal. The governor had to come over, and the state legislators and the assembly people came over, and this past week, the Common Council of Madison came over, and the mayor and her office came over. And it seems like we’ve been going out there and giving little spiels a lot, which is cool because also the Wienermobile’s in the same room, so it’s a big hit. [audience laughing] And now, you know, we’re lucky to have Amy Rosebrough because she happens to be the specialist in this time period, the Effigy Mound period. So this is where her role is really important.

– So when we sent the sample off for radiocarbon dating, I thought, you know, “If we’re really, really, really lucky, this thing might be maybe 500 years old, but that’s pushing the limits of what’s even possible to get a date like that.” And so when Jim announced what the date was, I don’t think I completely fainted, but I’m sure my knees went wobbly on me, and then I did a happy dance up and down the hall.

I did most of my doctoral work on this time period, on the people who built the effigy mounds in Madison, the mounds they built, the pottery they made, and to know that the canoe is a canoe that they sailed, that they fished from, that they crafted with their own hands, you know, some tangible part of their life that we would not normally have seen, you know, it just took my breath away. This is a fantastic time in Wisconsin. It’s a time when populations were on just the very precipice of a great change. Corn was just arriving in Wisconsin. They were beginning to plant it for the very first time. They were on the way towards settling into villages that would stay in the same place year round to be sedentary, but not quite there yet. Small communities would’ve been scattered around the four lakes in groups of small, probably nuclear family-sized houses with bent-pole construction covered in matting. Wisconsin, at that point, was mostly oak savanna here in the southern part of the state, with marshes around the lakes, patches of lowland and upland forest nearby, high deer populations; they hadn’t crashed yet. Deer, turkey, you know, all the nut-bearing trees you would want, and it was, Madison would’ve been an amazing place to live. So just right on the precipice of becoming sedentary corn farmers, but not there yet.

So it’s a time that we really like to study, you know, how do people react to change like this? What sparks people to change from one way of life to another? How are they conducting themselves on the land? And here they are. So the star shows where the canoe was found, so just off of Eagle Heights, you know, within sight of Blackhawk Country Club. If you were to go east off the slide a little bit, you’d be on campus. And those of you familiar with the campus area know that there are effigy mounds scattered all up and down from Observatory Hill, the Willow Creek or Willow Drive area. There were mounds on Bascom Hill at one point where North Hall stands. So one cluster of mounds and villages on campus, and then you cross Eagle Heights, and there’s kind of a gap. And then over by Blackhawk and Spring Harbor, another set of villages from that time period and another set of mounds. And we brought the canoe back to a beach right in the middle of that cluster of village and mound sites. So I have to think that it’s possible that the canoe returned home that day on November 2nd of last year. It came back to the beach it may have been launched from in the first place.

So again, you don’t get moments in your career that make you, you know, kinda shake and send the chills down your spine that often, but this canoe has brought several to me, and it’s been a blessing just top to bottom. And the net sinkers. So Tami mentioned that I had to think about it a while. When she brought them up out of the water, it was very clear that something unusual was going on with them. They were not the normal rocks you would find on the bottom. It’s a very fine-grained gravel down there with crushed-up shells and a lot of silt and sand, no big rocks where the canoe is. These are not rounded cobbles that you would find washing up and down along the beach, stream-tumbled. They had sharp edges. Some of them showed signs of being knapped by human hands, being worked in some way, but not all of them. But they were about the same size, except for number seven down there, which is kind of a misfit.

All the same size, they were all flat. They were all roughly the same shape. They had obviously been selected by humans. They were a collection or an assemblage of something. And this is an artifact that we don’t see on land that often. For an archeologist to recognize a net sinker, we have to see pretty clear notches on either side where they would attach the cord, and that’s what tips us off, aha, this is a net sinker. These notches tell us the function of this tool. But you don’t have to notch a stone to make it a net sinker. You can just pick up a flat piece of rock that’s already the same size and shape on the beach and tie a cord around it, and it’s fine. So some of these artifacts are just selected stones.

Some of them have been worked fairly extensively, and a couple have had one notch added because the second side was already kind of naturally shaped the way they wanted it to be. If they hadn’t been found together in a canoe underwater, this is kind of a hint, we call that a hint in archeology. You know, it might’ve been harder if we’d find, found one of the unworked pieces of stone in a terrestrial site in one of our screens, we’d probably go, “Oh, it’s just a rock,” and pitched it over our shoulder and walked away. So finding these in their context, again, something that just does not happen. We know of no other canoe that has an assemblage of artifacts like this. So they would’ve been used as weights. They were either tied to the bottom of a net, kind of a drift net, that would then have had bottle gourds or some kind of float at the top to keep it vertical in the water, perhaps like a gillnet for fish to get tangled. And we know that the people that built the effigy mounds here at this time period were master weavers because they did something else that is wonderful for us archeologists. They decorated their pots by pressing woven fabric into the wet clay, so we know what the nets look like even if we don’t have them. We know what their textiles look like even if we don’t have them.

We know that they knew how to weave very, very well. So the net’s gone, but the sinkers remain. These could also have been used to hold down a trotline. In other words, to anchor a cord to the bottom that would then go up to the surface of the water to another float, and then a cord and a hook would hang from the float up to the surface. And then whoever had put them out would come along and pick them up one by one at the end of the day and hope that there were fish involved. And we have some illustrations of how that would’ve looked from the East Coast, from the protohistorical historic period. So these are engravings done by man named de Bry, who was working in Virginia in the 1500s. So he had these illustrations done, and you see that the canoe was very, very similar to ours in the left and the top right. And then we have a historic photograph of another similar canoe in Florida. And you’ll notice that the individuals in these canoes are all standing for the most part.

So you can think of them almost like a paddleboard, ’cause this is a shallow-sided canoe. So they’re standing, they’re paddling, they’re poling, they’re reaching down, they’re picking up their nets, they’re picking up their trotlines, doing what they need to do, and then turning in and coming into shore, except once perhaps they didn’t.

– Jim: Thank you. [laughs]

– Amy: Thank you. [laughs]

– I should note that we do find net sinkers other places, usually associated with Great Lakes fishing. This is the only case that I know where they’d be found in context. You know, presumably there was a net in this boat, too, when it went down. The net has dissolved, and the net sinkers are left behind. So this was, you know, most canoes we find in Wisconsin and across the eastern U. S. are found in shallow water. There’s been lots of canoes found, especially in, Florida has lots of canoes. There’s 36 known canoes, as Tami was saying, in Wisconsin, and they were all found in shallow water, like a couple feet of water. That’s because it was the practice to sink your canoe in the fall to cache it, to preserve it, to protect it, and then find it again in the spring and bring it up. So the canoes we do find are usually in shallow water where somebody never came back to collect their canoe. This one has a different story. It has tools in it. You know, I think it’s Wisconsin’s first shipwreck in that it sank, and so we’re still trying to piece together why the boat sank, and I think the modeling will help. We didn’t mention that it’s made out of white oak, actually, which is a very dense and heavy wood, but not uncommon to make it out of the white oak. The oldest dugout canoe in Wisconsin, which is just a fragment, is also made out of white oak.

So with that, we could take your questions. And at the end, I’m also gonna put this down on the stage here, if you want to come down, and you could pick it up and touch it, and you know, don’t break it, but you could pick it up and touch it. It’s pretty sturdy, so. [audience applauding] Thank you. So yeah, go ahead and raise your hand. We’ll call on you, and I’ll repeat your question. Way in the back, the question is, “How big is this thing?” Yeah, we don’t have a scale in here. The canoe’s almost 16 feet long. So, you know, that’s about the size of canoes you see on the lake now. I think of it as probably a two-person canoe.

The canoes come in different sizes in Wisconsin. Some are very small, more one-person canoes. And you know, this is a fishing canoe. And there’s better-made canoes. You know, I think of this as a fishing boat. You know, it’s like a pickup truck of the water, and it’s not fancy, but you could put a lot of fish in there and at least for a while safely go on the lake.

– Man: So that’s like around 16 feet long, what’s left of it. Are you able to determine where the other end may have been? Or can you see signs that the end was pretty much right at the end of where it’s tapered off?

– Jim: You know, we have a lot of, the question is, how sure are we that we, how long the canoe really is, and I’ll let, who wants to answer that? We have ongoing discussions about this. We have a lot of pieces that we’re gonna, that have also been scanned, and we’re gonna, you could kind of fit them together in the scanning, hopefully, but I’ll let Caitlin.

– Yeah, from those other pieces that came out from near where the forward or shallow end of this canoe was, they were located very close to this end. They were maybe a couple of feet away from it. And so we believe that those are actually relatively close to where they would’ve been when the canoe was intact. So the idea is that basically the one end of the canoe broke off and then one piece, you know, was buried and preserved, and then another, the end that is really worn down had become exposed and then worn down and then, you know, over time kind of wore it down. We’ve been able to take, there’s three main large pieces and a bunch of little small ones, and the three main large pieces we’ve kind of tentatively played with putting together from looking at the wood grain and also the heartwood. You can tell that that is pretty much the end. Like, we have at least, I don’t know, a third of the end of the canoe. We don’t know exactly, I guess, we don’t have anything that like is an exact puzzle match into the pieces that we have right there, but we can kind of guesstimate at this point that we do have the, or not guesstimate, we know we have the end of the canoe. It’s just determining how far it is. From other canoes Tami’s looked at, there seems to be two different sizes. These that are like the 15, 16-foot-long ones, and then there’s ones that are shorter. There aren’t many examples of ones that are much longer, and so that’s why we’re kind of going with the fact that we have pretty much the entire thing here.

– And we assigned a person just today to, from the collections to work on the scans and to try to put these things, work on putting them together. It’s gonna take a while, and there’s probably a lot of gaps, ’cause they don’t easily fit together.

– Man: The hole almost looks like where a branch was.

– Jim: Yeah.

– Man: Are there any other knots along the canoe?

– There’s lots of knots, and one of our, if you could, I don’t know if you could see it from there, but this really thickens. There’s a big knot right here, and it gets like almost to, you know, 10 inches thick. They couldn’t remove that wood. And one of our working hypotheses about why the boat may have sunk is that most of the canoe is three or four inches thick. Right where the hole is, it’s about a half-inch thick.

I think it was, ’cause you don’t know how thick it is when you’re working the canoe, right? And I think they made it a little too thin, and I think it’s a weak spot with a knot, and somebody’s knee, somebody’s foot might’ve gone through it, and this may be what happened to this canoe. The question, though, is we hear this all the time from people, “Well, you know, wood will float with a hole in it.” And that’s in part true, it could. So we don’t know, but it’s a dense wood, but the one reason that we’re doing these 3D scans is the mechanical engineers are going to try to figure that out. Will this boat sink with a hole in it? I mean, that’s a critical thing. How else did it get, how did it get down there? I don’t, you know, maybe the front end broke off, too, at some point, I don’t know. If it doesn’t sink with this hole in it, what do you think, Tami, back to the drawing board? [group laughing]

– Sabotage. Insurance fraud?

– Yeah, exactly. [all laughing]

– Yep, that’s it, Tami.

– Yeah. [laughing]

– I know Tami, you’ve talked about this a lot with a lot of your friends and diving people about—

– Yeah, they’ll fight me all day telling me that the canoe is gonna float, and it depends on how loaded you have it, you know, or where you have it loaded. Everything, you know, and now on modern-day freighters is about loading, so I think it’s the same thing, so.

– Yeah, if it was full of a heavy net with lots of fish, a person, you know, there was a teenager on here, put his foot through there, and then he thought, “Oh, my God, I gotta get to shore,” so he swam to shore. Can you imagine his father? I’ve been there, you know? [all laughing] You know, he got grounded. I mean, it was a big story. [audience laughing]

– It certainly didn’t overturn ’cause the sinkers, the net sinkers wouldn’t still be there.

– And that’s, it went down, and the net sinkers, although the net was probably still in it, maybe the net got wrapped around or something. So who knows, but they were in such a neat little pile that it looks like the net might’ve been just twirled right there.

– Man: Why is it necessary to take these expensive preparations in order to gradually remove the canoe from the watery environment?

– Jim: Good question, and the question is, why does it take so long? It’s gonna take over two years to impregnate the cellular structure with this PEG. It’s because it goes by osmosis, and it just gradually gets into the wood, replaces the water, and so it’s just a slow process. There’s people, the wood experts around the world, and there’s lots of them, have been trying better techniques. In some parts of the world, they do it a little differently, but this seems to be the tried-and-true method still. And ending it with freeze-drying also, so one of the problems with PEG is that if you take it right to the extreme, it gets kinda waxy. It gets kind of a funny feeling, and sometimes even PEG will be dripping out of it. Now we’ll stop the process before that and then remove the remaining water with freeze-drying. And it’s stable enough, you got all the water out, it’ll be, you know, safe to move around.

– Man: And what would happen if you didn’t follow this procedure? It would just crack?

– It would likely crack and be in a number of pieces. We’re trying to avoid that. We’ve done pretty well so far. But as our consultant tells us, at this point, you can always put it back together. So we have all the pieces, so.

– But yeah, the wood could also as it’s drying start kind of warping and twisting, and it would end up not looking like a canoe anymore. We do have one end of a canoe that was recovered from Lake Delavan, I believe, a few, many, many years ago that was returned to us. It ended up in Iowa, I believe, and so it came back to us, and it’s the end of a canoe, but then as it goes forward, it’s literally, it looks like this kind of like spider piece, ’cause it’s just, all the dried pieces have kind of warped and twisted, and it just, it doesn’t really look like a canoe. It almost more looks like a root system as opposed to a canoe. And so that’s what we’re trying to avoid by going through this process.

– Jim: Well, I’ll end with one story. Bill Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer and all the tribes will be down here to view the canoe. And Bill Quackenbush is making a dugout canoe with teens right now, and he plans to come down in June and paddle the canoe out to the spot where this one was brought up and then paddle it down Lake Yahara to the state archival preservation facility where the canoe resides and come in and see the canoe. So anyway, thank you very much.

– Thanks, guys.

– Thank you for your attention.

– Thank you. [audience applauding]