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Daily Bread for 9.29.22: A 3,000-Year-Old Canoe from Lake Mendota

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 64. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 6:38 PM for 11h 47m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1957, the Green Bay Packers dedicate City Stadium, now known as Lambeau Field, and defeat the Chicago Bears, 21-17. In the capacity crowd of 32,132 is Vice President Nixon.


Sarah Kuta, writing in Smithsonian Magazine, reports 3,000-Year-Old Dugout Canoe Recovered From Wisconsin Lake (Archaeologists believe it’s the oldest canoe ever found in the Great Lakes region):

While teaching a scuba diving lesson this spring, Tamara Thomsen spotted a piece of wood poking out of the sand of Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. Though many people would’ve thought nothing of it, Thomsen—a maritime archaeologist—had a strong feeling the find was more than just driftwood.

That’s because, about a year earlier, Thomsen had discovered a 1,200-year-old canoe at the same lake in Madison. And her hunch was right: The piece of wood was part of another dugout canoe, this one an estimated 3,000 years old, the Wisconsin Historical Society revealed last week.

“Not a joke: I found another dugout canoe,” Thomsen texted her boss in May, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Sophie Carson.

The canoe—carved around 1,000 B.C.E., likely by ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation—is made from a single piece of white oak that stretches 14.5 feet long. Archaeologists believe it’s the oldest canoe ever found in the Great Lakes region by 1,000 years; it’s also the earliest direct evidence of water transportation used by Indigenous peoples in the region.

“This one predates agriculture, predates pottery. This one predates all of Wisconsin’s [effigy] mounds,” says Amy Rosebrough, an archaeologist with the historical society, to the Wisconsin State Journal’s Barry Adams. “I don’t have words for what this is right now. I can’t really think of much that competes with this. I really can’t. I mean Wisconsin has incredible archaeology, but this is stellar.”

Thomsen’s latest find was located only about 100 yards from the canoe she stumbled across in June 2021, while swimming on her day off. The vessels’ close proximity suggests that the shoreline of Lake Mendota, the largest of Madison’s five freshwater lakes, probably shifted over time. Indigenous people likely once lived in ancient villages where the water is now.


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