Ancient / Prehistoric Watercraft (General / Miscellaneous)

[Anonymous]

Experts study ancient boat found on lake bottom
Associated Press Apr. 22, 2004 11:40 AM

SANDPOINT, Idaho - Archeologists and divers are studying what may be an ancient dugout canoe found submerged under 40 feet of water in Lake Pend Oreille.

Matthew Russell, an underwater archaeologist with the National Park Service headquartered in Santa Fe, N.M., said it may take several weeks to determine the canoe's age and origin.

"This could be the only known find of its kind in Idaho," said Mary Anne Davis, assistant archaeologist with the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office in Boise. "It's pretty exciting - we really don't know what we have."

Archaeologists spent three days this week at the Lake Pend Oreille site with the divers. They took a quarter-inch core sample from the hull to determine the type of wood from which it was made.

Radiocarbon testing will determine whether the craft is prehistoric, Russell said.

The artifact is sturdy enough to be excavated from its watery resting space, but because archaeology is a destructive science, it will take some time to correctly identify the discovery. It is fairly fragile in some places, Russell said.

azcentral.com/news/articles/00422ancient-canoe-ON.html
Link is dead. No archived version found.

 

[ArthurASCII]

What a find!

I'd love to see some photos.

---

Edit to Add: Here's the photo that accompanied one of the 2004 articles describing its discovery.

 

[Stormkhan]

It'd be a bugger if they discover "Titanic" painted on it's bows ...

 

[Anonymous]

These dugout canoes found quite frequently in Ireland, perhaps due to large number of crannogs. They are usually dated to the Bronze Age. There is an impressive one in the National History Museum in Dublin, measures about 40 foot.

 

[ramonmercado]

Bronze age canoe stops pipeline
Last Updated: Thursday, 24 August 2006, 16:25 GMT 17:25 UK

Archaeologists have been working to help protect the canoe since its discovery.

Archaeologists working on a gas pipeline near Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire have unearthed what they believe to be a 3,400-year-old canoe. Work has stopped on a section of the pipeline near St Botolphs to allow the Bronze Age oak relic to be recovered.

It is the first such discovery in Wales and only 150 exist across Europe.

Senior archaeologist Neil Fairburn said: "You could never have expected to find anything like this in this small wetland area, it's just awesome."

The team has also found evidence of a small settlement, a small amount of property and other items, such as polished stone rings.

Fragment

Mr Fairburn, who works for the National Grid, said: "Everybody here is excited and it's unlikely they'll ever work on anything like this again."

It was found six weeks ago less than a metre below the surface in a marshy area of land, but archaeologists have only just had it confirmed what the find was. Work was stopped immediately.

A fragment was sent to experts in Miami, who radio carbon dated it to 1,420 BC.


If the gas pipeline had not been coming through here we would not have this

Senior archaeologist Neil Fairburn

The canoe is carved from a single trunk of oak, and measures 4.5m x 0.9m (15ft x 3ft).

It is being kept continuously wet to prevent it from rotting.

Mr Fairburn added: "The wet conditions have provided beautiful preservation conditions for the wood.

"If the gas pipeline had not been coming through here we would not have this."

It will take another two weeks before the team is ready to move the canoe, which will be handed over to the National Museum of Wales.

Contractors have been moved to work on other parts of the route, which will run the breadth of Wales.

The natural gas pipeline will link two liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals at Milford with the UK's gas supply.

There have been protests against the LNG and pipeline project on safety and environmental grounds - and this was not the first time work had been stopped after an unexpected discovery.

Earlier this year work was stopped on a section of the route at St Clears after a human thigh bone and other fragments were unearthed by contractors.

The remains were later identified as specimens used by the medical profession or students.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wale ... 282874.stm

 

[rynner2]

Bronze age man's lunch: a spoonful of nettle stew
Archaeological dig reveals hundreds of objects, from six oak-tree boats to a bowl of food
Dalya Alberge The Observer, Sunday 4 December 2011

Six boats hollowed out of oak tree trunks are among hundreds of intact artefacts from 3,000 years ago that have been discovered in the Cambridgeshire fens, the Observer can reveal.

The scale, quality and condition of the objects, the largest bronze age collection ever found in one place in Britain, have astonished archaeologists – and barely a fraction of the site has been excavated. ...

The boats – two of which bear unusual decoration – are in such good condition that the wood grain and colour can be seen clearly, as can signs of repairs by their owners.

David Gibson, head of Cambridge University's archaeological unit, said the discoveries were internationally important. "One canoe would be great. Two, exceptional. Six almost feels greedy," he said. ...

The artefacts survived because they were immersed in deep layers of peat and silt. When those layers are lifted off, "the objects are so pristine", Knight said, "it's as if 3,000 years never happened. The softest, wettest deposits ensured that past activity has been cosseted."

The artefacts were submerged under an ancient watercourse along the southern edge of the Flag Fen Basin, land altered over millennia by rising sea levels. In the 17th century the Dutch showed how to drain waterlogged land, and today the site east of Peterborough is accessible. Knight said: "In our [bronze age] landscape… you could have walked along the bottom of the fenland basin and to the bottom of the North Sea hunting for deer. By the Roman period, you were perched up at Peterborough, looking out over a huge wet expanse of peat and reed swamp." At ground level, there had been no clue to the artefacts' existence because they were so deep – four metres below ground – and would not have been picked up by aerial, radar, or other exploratory surveys. ...

One of the boats is 8.3 metres long. "It feels as if you could get the whole family – granny, grandad, a couple of goats and everything – in there," said Knight. The smallest boat is just over four metres long.

The finds reveal how, with the rise in water levels in the bronze age, people adapted to a wetland environment, using rivers for transport, living off pike, perch, carp and eel. How far they could travel in the log boats is unclear. Although the boats were unlikely to have been used at sea, one of the bronze age swords is of a type normally found in northern Spain.

Once removed from the fenland, the artefacts must be conserved before eventual public display. ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/ ... gy-fenland

 

[EnolaGaia]

Experts study ancient boat found on lake bottom
Associated Press Apr. 22, 2004 11:40 AM

SANDPOINT, Idaho - Archeologists and divers are studying what may be an ancient dugout canoe found submerged under 40 feet of water in Lake Pend Oreille.

Update ...

It turned out the dugout canoe wasn't as old as they originally thought ...

Old dugout found in lake isn’t so old
Tue., June 22, 2004

Scuba divers might have discovered the old dugout canoe, but the sunken boat and its story might never be pulled from the depths of Lake Pend Oreille.

Wood samples from the canoe are too young to yield a precise age through carbon dating, meaning the boat is less than 380 years old but probably at least 100 years old, said Mary Anne Davis, associate state archaeologist with the Idaho State Historical Society.

“Radiocarbon dating is not very accurate for fairly recent deposits or objects,” she said.

The fate of the canoe is uncertain. For now, it will remain resting on its side in a secret location 40 feet below the surface. Among the groups interested in the canoe are the American Indian tribes that traditionally traveled the lake.

Although the canoeists didn’t paddle ice-age meltwater and the dugout is younger than the ships that carried Vikings, Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims, the dugout still has considerable cultural and historical value.

“It’s very significant,” Davis said. “It just offers up a lot of potential information. If it’s from during the time of the fur traders, that’s just amazing. They didn’t leave much behind.”

Two divers from Sandpoint stumbled across the canoe in 40 feet of water on New Year’s Day. ...

The divers shared their information with a network of local historians. Before long, the discovery caught the attention of an expert team from the National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Division. In late April, the underwater archaeologists worked with Jones and Redfield to document the find over the course of seven dives in 41-degree water.

Laboratory samples recently revealed that the dugout was carved from a ponderosa pine log, Davis said. Although the precise age is unknown, Davis suspects the canoe was built sometime after 1800, but before 1882. The end date was revealed not from the wizardry of technology, but because of the persistent sleuthing of Ann Ferguson, the curator of the Bonner County Museum.

Fractured rock resting in the bottom of the canoe led Ferguson to believe that it sank before blasting occurred on a nearby shore during railroad construction in 1882. Ferguson also searched ethnographic documents and found dugouts were not commonly used by the Kalispel and Kootenai tribes.

“This canoe could have been made by Native Americans, fur traders or early Euro-American settlers,” Ferguson said, in a written statement. “Its history may never be completely known to us, but it definitely plays an important part in the story of early transportation in northern Idaho.”

Francis Cullooyah, director of the Kalispel Tribe’s culture program, said white pine bark was traditionally the preferred construction material for canoes used on Lake Pend Oreille and nearby rivers. “That’s not saying that our people may have used dugouts. I would imagine at some point in time maybe there were dugout canoes, but I have never personally seen anything to that effect.” ...

Cullooyah said the tribe has been consulted frequently during the archaeological investigation. He’s just as mystified as the scientists as to the origin and owner of the canoe. Maybe it floated away from shore and was swamped by waves, he said. There’s a small chance the canoe could have been sunk as a burial vessel. ...

The Kalispel Tribe doesn’t have a strong position on the fate of the canoe, he added.

“If it’s left in the water that would be fine,” Cullooyah said. “Just to have it protected. As long as we know that it’s there.”

Tim Ryan, culture and resources manager for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, said raising the dugout should be studied. “We don’t see them very often. It would be a significant cultural resource that would be worth preserving.”

Like any other artifact or natural resource on the bottom of an Idaho lake, the canoe is technically the property of the state, said Jim Brady, with the Idaho Department of Lands. But the state is “more than willing” to allow a tribe to remove the canoe, so long as it is properly preserved and publicly displayed, he said.

When the boat was discovered, there was considerable local interest in preservation and display at the county museum, Brady said. The preservation process for submerged wood involves a time-consuming process of soaking the wood in chemical baths with varying degrees of strength.

The canoe’s relatively young age and the high cost of preservation have dampened the enthusiasm. ...

“Since it’s not as old as initially thought, the interest to get that kind of money is not as strong.”

The boat’s location will be kept secret, Brady said, just as it is with the paddlewheelers, cement barges and other passenger boats hidden in the waters of Pend Oreille and Coeur d’Alene lakes. Some mysteries are better left for another generation to solve, he said.

SOURCE: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2004/jun/22/old-dugout-found-in-lake-isnt-so-old/

 

[ramonmercado]

Canoe, other artifacts and murals found.

Archaeologists have discovered a wooden Mayan canoe in southern Mexico, believed to be over 1,000 years old.

Measuring over 5ft (1.6m), it was found almost completely intact, submerged in a freshwater pool near the ruined Mayan city of Chichen Itza. Mexico's antiquities institute (Inah) says it may have been used to extract water or deposit ritual offers. The rare find came during construction work on a new tourist railway known as the Maya Train.

In a statement, the Inah said archaeologists had also discovered ceramics, a ritual knife and painted murals of hands on a rockface in the pool, known as a cenote. Experts from Paris's Sorbonne University have been helping with pin-pointing the canoe's exact age and type, the statement said. A 3D model of it would also be made to allow replicas to be made, and to facilitate further study, it added.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-59101592

 

[EnolaGaia]

A remarkably intact 1,200 year old canoe has now been retrieved from Lake Mendota (Wisconsin).

Scuba divers thought it was just a log in a lake. Turns out they discovered a 1,200-year-old canoe

On a brisk Tuesday at Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, maritime archaeologists, scuba divers, and residents of the Spring Harbor neighborhood stood in the cold as a canoe was brought to shore. But this was not just any racing or touring canoe -- it dates back more than 1,200 years.

After days of planning the best way to raise the dugout canoe, teams of divers rejoiced as the canoe was laid down on the shore safely. ...

Carbon-14 dating on the canoe determined it was 1,200 years old, making it one of the oldest intact vessels ever found in Wisconsin ...

The canoe survived ... because it was kept in a constantly wet environment away from light in relatively deeper water. It was discovered on a slope under about 27 feet of water ... the deepest any dugout has been recovered. ...

FULL STORY (With More Info & Photos): https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/05/us/canoe-wisconsin-lake-mendota-scn-trnd/index.html