Ancient Dugout Canoe ‘Parking Lot’ in a Wisconcin Lake

Dating back at least 5,000 years, an expert describes it as "a parking spot that’s been used for millennia, over and over.”

One of the submerged dugout canoes

In 2021, archaeologists unearthed the remains of a 1,200-year-old dugout canoe from a lake in Madison, Wisconsin. A year later, they found a second canoe in the same lake - and this time, the vessel was 3,000 years old. Then they discovered more and more. In total, researchers have found 16 canoes in Lake Mendota, a 9,781-acre body of water in Madison. Based on the number of canoes and the location of the site, archaeologists suspect the vessels were intentionally stashed there so that anyone could use them for navigating the region’s waterways - sort of like a modern bike-share program.

Radiocarbon dating has revealed that the oldest canoe is around 5,200 years old, while the youngest is 700 years old.

For the past few years, Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society has been collaborating with other teams to try and figure things out. Together, they’re unraveling the mysteries of the Indigenous canoes, which are some of the oldest surviving specimens of their kind in eastern North America.

The canoes are situated in two distinct groupings, near places where water flowed down to the lake from higher elevations. “There’s bluffs that are about 35 feet above the lake, and really the only access to get up and down to the lake is through those wash ways,” says Thomsen. “And we believe that those likely were entry access points for millennia, and that’s why the canoes were left in front of them.”

They may have been used for fishing and were likely also used to travel between communities and visit spiritual sites.

Source