A Diver Volunteered to Clean Up Trash From a Wisconsin Lake. He Discovered a 1,000-Year-Old Dugout Canoe at the Bottom Instead

Mark Schachtner was just about to wrap up his dive session in Wisconsin’s Pewaukee Lake when he spotted a long object resting on the lake floor. Intrigued, Schachtner swam closer and began to inspect the mysterious object. Within a few seconds, he realized he was looking at a canoe, possibly an extremely old one.

Now, experts with the Wisconsin Historical Society have determined that the vessel is a roughly 1,000-year-old dugout canoe, likely handcrafted and used by Indigenous communities in the late 10th or early 11th century. Numerous dugout canoes have been found throughout Wisconsin, including 16 in an ancient canoe “parking lot” in Lake Mendota, near the state capital Madison. But the newly discovered vessel is believed to be the first found in Pewaukee Lake, a 2,437-acre, spring-fed body of water located in Waukesha County, on the western outskirts of Milwaukee.

Schachtner, a 45-year-old member of the 4 Seasons Scuba Diving Club, was participating in a volunteer trash cleanup dive in Pewaukee Lake on May 6 when he spotted the canoe. Immediately, he realized that he had stumbled upon something special. He made note of the vessel’s location and got in touch with Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archaeologist with the society.

There’s not much for big logs down there unless it’s a fish crib or something. The whole thing was sticking out.” Five days after Schachtner’s initial discovery, he and Thomsen returned to the site together to take measurements, snap photos and videos, and collect a small sample of the wood. The vessel, which archaeologists say is in good condition, measures 17.3 feet long by 1.8 feet wide at its thickest point, with 2.5-inch-thick walls and a 4.8-inch-thick bottom.

In August, the society received the results of radiocarbon dating and wood identification tests, which revealed that the canoe was crafted roughly a millennia ago from white oak. Testing revealed a 70 percent chance the canoe was created between 992 and 1049 C.E., an era known to archaeologists as the Late Woodland Period, when the Mississippian culture was flourishing and Indigenous groups were building effigy mounds and growing maize. Around this same time, the Cahokia people were expanding into Wisconsin, where they established trading posts and fortified settlements like Aztalan, now Aztalan State Park.

To better understand the canoe, the society’s experts are consulting with Larry Plucinski, tribal historic preservation officer for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and Bill Quackenbush, a retired tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation. Both are longtime tribal partners on the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project, which is being spearheaded by Thomsen and Sissel Schroeder, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Today, the canoe rests on the lake bottom, roughly 15 feet below the surface.