Watch now: A 1,200-year-old dugout canoe is raised from Lake Mendota

[Jilly_in_VA]

Tamara Thomsen and Mallory Dragt thought they would take a spin under Lake Mendota on a couple of underwater scooters, motorized gadgets that scuba divers use to propel themselves through the water.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning in June, and the duo, who work at Diversions Scuba, debated whether they had just seen a log sticking out of the bottom of the 9,781-acre lake or something extremely rare.

The discovery, on a slope in 27 feet of water near Shorewood Hills, has turned out to be about as historic as it gets.

After a bit of investigation, it turns out that Thomsen, who is also a maritime archaeologist for the Wisconsin Historical Society, was right in judging that it was more than just a log: It was a dugout canoe. A few weeks later, carbon-14 dating showed that the 15-foot-long vessel was an estimated 1,200 years old, the oldest intact boat ever found in Wisconsin waters.

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/watch-now-a-1-200-year-old-dugout-canoe-is-raised-from-lake-mendota/article_c9164032-3ba1-5e8c-9151-97e793920db5.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-1
________________________________________________________________
In my home town! Video at the site!!!! How cool is this?

[2naSalit]

1. So cool!

I used to live right on the lakeshore once upon a time in a different century.

[Jilly_in_VA]

3. So did I

after my parents moved. I grew up on the Near West Side.

[2naSalit]

4. I...

Went there when I left my spouse, stayed around for about five years. It was a really fun and cool town until the Cubans showed up in the early 80s and shut down a bunch of the night clubs with their knife and gun fights that they seemed to think was what we did since that's what they saw Americans do in movies. My sweetie there was a social worker who dealt with them every day always came home and told me about the guns and knives he took away from them. It was a nightmare.

[Jilly_in_VA]

5. I lived there

from 1952 to 1973. My parents left in 1964 for Syracuse, NY and I refused to go with them. I went from my home on the Near West Side to what would later become Miffland but was then just West Mifflin St., to the lakeshore on E. Gilman, to the South Side, to Wil-Mar, to finally the Atwood neighborhood where my late ex and I bought a house. But finally the winters drove me out. One January where the temperature got above 10 degrees exactly 5 times and I was stuck indoors with a small baby was ENOUGH! We moved to Tennessee after that.

[2naSalit]

6. I moved...

Out to Mt Horeb for a couple years and then to San Diego for a few years, I needed a break from winter for a while. Long enough to realize that I can't live without winter!



So I moved to Idaho and then Montana when the politics in the two states were very different. Now they are almost the same. Time to move on... again.

[Jilly_in_VA]

7. One of my brothers

lives in Montana, in the Bitterroot Valley. He loves the area and the scenery. The politics, not so much.

[2naSalit]

8. That's my issue too.

[AllyCat]

9. I have never heard this.

Moved here in 1989. What wild stories! Seemed pretty safe when I got here. Less so now. Moved to the burbs but work downtown.

[2naSalit]

10. I was there until 1984...

The Muriel boat lift was a nightmare, a large number of them ended up at Ft McCoy, I used to bring in tear gas from Chicago. As they were slowly released they ended up in Madison and Milwaukee mostly. Night life turned to shit in a hurry. I moved to Mt Horeb about then and left the state a couple years later for a job in SoCal.

[Heartstrings]

2. Way cool!

My daughter lives just across the Isthmus on Lake Monona!