On May 6, a diver with a local scuba club was on a volunteer trash cleanup dive in Pewaukee Lake, on the western edge of Milwaukee. He was about to wrap up when he saw a long object resting on the bottom. He swam closer. Within a few seconds he knew he was looking at a canoe, and possibly a very old one.
He was right. Smithsonian Magazine reported that the Wisconsin Historical Society has since dated the vessel to roughly 1,000 years ago. It is a dugout canoe, carved from white oak and shaped with fire, likely made and used by Indigenous communities in the late 10th or early 11th century.
What a Careful Look Turns Up
The canoe sits about 15 feet down. The diver told a reporter it stuck out to him because there are not many big logs on that bottom. He had heard about the dugout canoes archaeologists found in Lake Mendota, and he always kept his eyes open.
So he did the right things. He noted where it was and got in touch with a maritime archaeologist at the Historical Society. Five days later the two of them went back down together to measure it, photograph it, film it and take a small wood sample. The canoe measures 17.3 feet long and 1.8 feet wide at its widest, and archaeologists say it is in good condition.
In August, radiocarbon dating came back with a 70 percent chance the canoe was made between 992 and 1049.
Some Things Stay on the Bottom
The canoe is not coming up. In keeping with the wishes of Wisconsin's Indigenous nations, it will stay where it is, and the Historical Society notes that staying underwater gives it the best chance of preservation. The exact location is private. State law prohibits removing, defacing, displacing or destroying it.
That is a lesson every cleanup diver should carry. The job is not to grab whatever is down there. It is to look closely, know what you are looking at, and bring up what does not belong.
What Does Not Belong
Most of what sits on the bottom of a lake is not a thousand years old. It is last summer's chair, a lost cooler, a fishing line wrapped around a rock. And some of it is far bigger.
Our Utah Waterways Submerged Debris Atlas documents an estimated 499 submerged items across 20 Utah lakes, including 56 vehicles and 103 vessels that are individually confirmed. A sunken vehicle carries a fuel tank, engine oil, ethylene glycol and a lead acid battery. Under the Clean Water Act, a discharge that leaves a visible sheen on the water is reportable, and the U.S. Geological Survey has tracked petroleum contamination persisting in groundwater for decades at its research site near Bemidji, Minnesota.
What Fathom Does Today
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our volunteer divers do the same kind of work the Wisconsin diver was doing that day: carrying trash out of the water by hand. On October 10, four of our divers worked Haws Point at Strawberry Reservoir and came up with about 35 pounds of trash by our estimate, including three folding chairs, an umbrella and a kite. On two September crew dives at Deer Creek Reservoir, we brought up about 58 pounds more.
The vehicles and vessels in the Atlas will take much more than hands. We are working to start recovering submerged vehicles, and we are doing it in order: insurance, permits and commercial dive certification first.
Keep Your Eyes Open
A volunteer went down to pick up trash and found a canoe carved a thousand years ago. Every lake bottom holds a record of what went into it. Reading that record carefully is how you protect the water, and how you know what to bring home.
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit running volunteer dive cleanups on Utah's lakes and waterways and building toward the recovery of submerged vehicles and vessels. Donate or volunteer at fathomrestoration.org.
