Tamara Thomsen was 24 feet underwater when she spotted it: the decaying end of a dugout canoe, a great white oak carved some 1,200 years ago. It was jutting out of a sandy ridge in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota—a body of water skirting Madison, the state capital—and she knew it was a remarkable find. “What I did not understand was the breadth of the discovery.
” Thomsen was diving that summer day in 2021 as a private citizen, chasing fish and collecting trash. More often, you’ll find the maritime archaeologist in the Great Lakes, surveying deep-water sites for the Wisconsin Historical Society. Lake Mendota had not been on the archaeologist’s radar, and she certainly wasn’t hunting for dugout canoes.
Thomsen usually looks for shipwrecks, like 19th-century freighters. It might seem remarkable that she recognized the find for what it was: Dugout canoes, the world’s oldest boat type found to date, are simply hollowed-out logs. In 2018, however, Thomsen had teamed up with Sissel Schroeder, an archaeologist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to help an undergraduate student catalog Wisconsin’s extant dugout canoes.
When the project began, historians believed 11 existed in collections across the state. Less than a year later, after scouring private collections, supper clubs, local museums and more, the team had counted 34. Thomsen’s 2021 find spurred the two women to continue their hunt—and take it public.
Establishing the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Proje.