Lake Mendota is an old canoe stop –

Since the first ancient canoe was discovered in 2021 at Lake Meadowa in Madison, Wisconsin, 15 more canoes have been mapped on the lakebed, shedding new light on how Native communities navigated the land.

The first canoe was found on the lake bed in 24 feet of water and was 1,200 years old. The following summer, archaeologists discovered the remains of a 3,000-year-old canoe. Both are recycled from water and, starting in 2024, treated with polyethylene glycol (PEG) to stabilize the wood. Once the PEG treatment is complete next year, the canoes will need to be shipped to Texas A&M University, where they will be freeze-dried to complete the stabilization process. In September, the Wisconsin Historical Society received a grant from the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures grant program that will be used to ensure the safe transportation of the canoes from Wisconsin to a freeze-drying facility in Texas.

Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen with Ho-Chunk State Historic Preservation Officer Bill Quackenbush, Lake Superior Badd River Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Larry Plucinski and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Sissel Schroeder The collaboration took five years to map the locations of canoes in Lake Mendota, not to retrieve the canoes from the water but to study them as they were put in place. In addition to finding 14 more canoes, the team collected samples from each ancient vessel with the aim of determining the type of wood used and its age.

An analysis by the USDA Forest Products Laboratory found that half of the 16 canoes were made of red or white oak. Radiocarbon dating found that the oldest canoe was made about 5,200 years ago, making it older than the Great Pyramid of Giza, making it the third oldest canoe in North America. (The two oldest ones are about 7,000 years old and were found in Florida.)

The popularity of oak, especially red oak, which was not typically used in boats due to its tendency to absorb water, prompted Thomson to investigate the reasons behind its use in canoe construction.

“When you look at the shoreline map with the canoe locations, it’s clear there are two different groups,” Thomson said. “Looking at the tree taxonomy, we not only wanted to know why the builders used certain trees, but also why these canoes were at these two sites. Carbon dating of the samples told us that both sites were used for thousands of years, so we started to formulate theories as to why they were left where they were and why certain trees were used.” […]

Oak, as well as some of the other species in the sample, are known to form conifers when the tree encounters stress during its growth cycle, such as injury or pathogen infection. Conifers are also a natural part of the aging process of trees. During the development of tylosis, balloon-like structures form inside the wood’s blood vessels, blocking the movement of water, thereby preventing the spread of fungi and bacteria, and compartmentalizing damage to protect the wood from decay. Tylose therefore makes the wood more suitable for boat building due to its enhanced water resistance, buoyancy and corrosion resistance.

“It’s entirely possible that canoe builders deliberately selected trees that were damaged by weather, or intentionally injured them during their growth cycle, to induce zebra disease. We think of bioengineering as a modern practice, but our samples suggest that this may have been happening long before the term was coined in the mid-20th century,” Thomson said.

As for the two locations where the canoes gathered, the researchers compared them to trails used by Native American communities, both of which were strategically placed to allow travel between well-known sites on the lake and land. These canoes may not be owned by individuals, but used publicly and stored in predetermined locations, much like bike share programs in cities today.

Canoes could facilitate the extraction of natural resources from the lake, such as fish—as shown by the seven net sinkers found in Canoe #1 and the three net sinkers found in Canoe #13—but also allow more efficient trade travel between communities and access to places of spiritual importance, such as Lake Wingra. Before European settlers arrived in the area and terraformed it to accommodate modern transportation, the landscape around Lake Madison looked very different, with massive cliffs making overland travel difficult in some areas. For the communities that inhabited the area thousands of years before Wisconsin became a state, canoe travel may have been more efficient for certain routes.