As she was giving scuba diving lessons to her students, Tamara Thomsen noticed a piece of wood that peeked out from the sand. Her student didn't give too much attention to it as Thomsen, who is also a maritime archaeologist, knew what exactly they accidentally found.
Thomsen sent a text to her superior saying, "This is not a joke, I found another dugout canoe." The discovery happened in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin.
This is the second time Thomsen accidentally encountered the ancient canoe's fragments. She initially stumbled upon the same kind of artifacts in May last year, in the same lake during her off-work day, according to a report from NPR.
Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists determined that the recently found canoe fragment was about three thousand years old, as the organization announced on Thursday.
Ancient Canoe Marks Ancient Civilization Within the Lake
Thomsen mentioned that when the radiocarbon dating outcome came back, she wrote "1000 B.C" on a sticky note and stared in disbelief at the results.
She said to NPR, "It just makes you think about the people that were on this landscape where I live, and to imagine they were here hunting, gathering, fishing."
The ancient canoe is 14.5 feet long and carved from a big piece of a white oak tree. It is claimed that the oldest canoe was recovered from the Great Lakes region and roughly aged as ten-centuries.
The two boats found in Lake Mendota were located about 100 yards apart. The archaeologists claim that the location and proximity of the two canoes suggest that ancient villages may have once been civilized in the lake's location before the changes in the shoreline further developed.
Wisconsin Historical Society staff and volunteers remove the canoe from its transport trailer and carry it into the State Archive Preservation Facility in Madison.
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Upcoming Further Recovery
The scientists believed that the 3000-year-old canoe is the earliest direct proof of water transportation used by native tribes from the Great Lakes region.
Some members from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Bad River Tribe collaborated with the Wisconsin Historical Society to recover the ancient boat last spring.
The president of Ho-chunk Tribe Marlon WhiteEagle said in a statement that the recovery of the canoe that was built by ancestral people gives them further proof that the Natives have occupied the Teejop (Four Lakes) for more than a millennia. WhiteEagle added, "Our ancestral lands are here and we had a developed society of transportation, trade, and commerce."
The two ancient water transportation means, discovered by Thomsen, will go through a two-year preservation process. She added that the archaeologists' team will conduct a first systematic search in Lake Mendota and that they can possibly recover more fragments of the canoes this coming winter.
Founded in 1846, the Wisconsin Historical Society is known as one of the largest and most diverse and active state historical societies in the US. It is both a private membership organization and a state agency that aims to help people connect to the ancient past by archiving, collecting, and sharing stories. The Wisconsin Historical Society caters to millions of individuals annually through a wide range of programs, campaigns, and services stated on their website.
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