Month: November 2025

Mendota Lake was an ancient canoe docking station

Ancient

Since the first ancient dugout canoe was recovered from Lake Medota in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2021, another 15 of them been mapped on the lake bed, shedding new light on the way First Nations communities navigated the landscape.

The first canoe, found on the lakebed under 24 feet of water, was 1,200 years old. The next summer archaeologists found the remains of a 3,000-year-old canoe. Both of them were recovered from the water and in 2024 began treatment with Polyethylene Glycol (PEG) to stabilize the wood. When the PEG treatment is finished next year, the canoes will need to be transported to Texas A&M where they will be freeze-dried to complete the stabilization process. In September the Wisconsin Historical Society received a grant from the Save America’s Treasures grant program of the National Park Service, Department of Interior, that will go towards ensuring the safe transport of the canoes from Wisconsin to the freeze-drying facility in Texas.

Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen in partnership with Ho-Chunk Nation Historic Preservation Officer Bill Quackenbush, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Larry Plucinski and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Sissel Schroeder have been working together for five years to map the locations of dugout canoes in Lake Mendota, not to recover them from the water, but to study them in place. In addition to locating another 14 canoes, the team has taken samples from each of the ancient vessels with the goal of identifying the type of wood used and their ages.

Analysis conducted by the USDA Forest Products Laboratory has found that half of the 16 canoes were made either of red or white oak. Radiocarbon dating found that the oldest canoe mas made around 5,200 years ago, older than the Great Pyramid of Giza, making it the third oldest in North America. (The oldest two are around 7,000 years old and were found in Florida.)

The prevalence of oak—and particularly red oak, which is not typically used for watercraft due to its tendency to absorb water—prompted Thomsen to examine the reasoning behind its use for canoe building.

“When you look at the shoreline map with canoe locations charted, it’s clear that there are two distinctive groupings represented,” said Thomsen. “Looking at the tree species taxonomy, we wondered not just why certain trees were used by the builders but also why these canoes were situated in these two locations. Carbon dating from the samples told us that both spots were in use over thousands of years, and so we started to form theories as to why they were left where they were and why certain trees were used.” […]

Oak wood, along with some of the other species represented in the samples, is known to form tyloses when the tree encounters stress during the growth cycle such as through wounding or pathogen infection. Tyloses also form as a natural part of a tree’s aging process. During the production of tylosis, balloon-like structures form inside of the wood’s vessels which blocks water movement—preventing the spread of fungi and bacteria and compartmentalizing injuries to protect the wood from decay. As a result, the tyloses make the wood better suited for boat building due to its increased water resistance, buoyancy and protection against rot.

“It’s entirely possible that the canoe builders were intentionally selecting trees that had been damaged from weather or purposefully wounding them during their growth cycle to induce tyloses. We think of bioengineering as a modern practice, but the samples we have suggest this may have been taking place long before the term was coined in the mid-20th century,” said Thomsen.

As for the two locations where canoes are grouped, researchers compared them to trailways used by Native American communities and both of them are strategically placed for travel over the lake and between places of note on the land. The canoes were likely not owned by individuals, but rather used communally and stored at predetermined locations in the same way that bike sharing programs work in cities today.

The canoes could facilitate access to natural resources from the lake like fish—as suggested by the seven net sinkers found with Canoe #1 and three found with Canoe #13—but could also make travel more efficient between communities for trading and to access places of spiritual importance, such as Lake Wingra. The landscape around Madison lakes looked very different before European settlers arrived in the area and conducted terraforming to suit modern transportation, with large bluffs that made traveling over the land difficult in some areas. Canoe travel may have been more efficient for certain routes for the communities who lived in the area spanning thousands of years before Wisconsin became a state.

Lady with the inverted diadem found in Archaic cemetery

Ancient

A excavation on the eastern slopes of the dried Lake Kopaida in central Greece has unearthed a rich Early Archaic-era burial of a noble woman wearing an upside-down bronze diadem. The burial dates to the second half of the 7th century B.C., a period when the power of ancestral hereditary kingship in Boeotia was waning while the nobility’s was on the rise. Her diadem was symbolic of the new power of the non-monarchical elites.

Archaeologists with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Phthiotis and Evrytania have been carrying out a rescue excavation in advance of construction of a photovoltaic park. They have so far unearthed 40 graves from the Archaic and Classical periods. Different types of burials, including pit graves, burial pyres and graves with tile roofs, were found grouped in clusters.

The lady with the diadem was found in a cluster of three pit graves. Analysis of her teeth identified her as an adult woman between 20 and 30 years of age. She was buried wearing a banded bronze diadem with a large rosette shaped like a radiant sun in the center of her forehead. The band of the diadem is embossed with pairs of male and female lions facing each other, symbols of royal authority. The crown was placed upside-down, so the lions are on their backs. This likely symbolized the fall of a monarch, in this case dethroned by death.

She was buried with a multitude of other valuable objects, including two oversized bronze brooches of the Boeotian type, ornamented with stylized geometric horses, a necklace with a large central vase-shaped amulet, bone and ivory beads and bronze rosettes, copper earrings, a bracelet, and spiral rings on all of her fingers. This was a woman of immense wealth and status in the community, not a queen, but powerful enough to adopt the symbols of monarchy.

One of the other pit burials in the cluster with her also contained the remains of a bronze diadem with rosettes. This one belonged to a young girl about four years of age, and in addition to the diadem on her head, she wore similar jewelry to the noblewoman, including a necklace with a vase-shaped amulet. The burial dates to the same period, so it’s possible the two were related in some way.

Other notable finds from the cemetery include a Siana-type kylix (drinking cup) decorated with roosters and a trefoil-shaped oenochoe (wine pitcher) decorated with Hermes as psychopomp (guide of souls) and harpies discovered in a mid-6th-century B.C. grave, bronze flasks and black-figure and black-lettered pottery from the renown ceramic workshops of Akraiphia.

Three large coins hoard found in late Roman-era homes

Ancient, Treasures

Three large coins hoards from Late Antiquity have been discovered in an ancient Roman residential block in Senon, northeastern France. Instead of being secreted during periods of instability, however, these were carefully installed and regularly maintained and accessed.

Senon was an important city of the Mediomatrici tribe, documented in Roman sources after the conquest of Gaul (57 B.C.). While pre-Roman Gallic remains had been found before, the excavations were too small in scale to draw any conclusions about the extent and nature of the settlement. The excavation revealed the remains of timber-framed constructions that proved it was a fully developed settlement from the middle of the 2nd century B.C. to the beginning of the Roman period.

The excavation also revealed how the Gallic settlement changed after the conquest. In the 1st century A.D., the growth of the city coupled with Roman building methods led to an explosion in stone quarrying. The wood and earth structures that characterized the Gallic settlement were overtaken by stone construction, and builders turned to local sources of limestone to supply it. No fewer than 10 quarry pits were found on the site, some as much as 10 feet deep. As the city expanded, the quarry pits were reused. Scientific analysis will determine what exactly they were used for, but possibilities includes as storage spaces or latrines.

The rebuilt stone houses and roads were laid out in a typical Roman pattern, and the survival of so many remains makes it possible for archaeologists map the buildings, their architectural features and therefore the economic status of their owners. At least three buildings had living rooms with concrete floors, hypocaust heating, meticulously designed cellars, ovens and courtyards in the back. The people who lived in these homes were well-off, likely commercial class like merchants or successful artisans.

The coins hoards were placed inside large amphorae in pits dug inside the homes. The were in different dwellings, but they all have in common the same type of container holding thousand pf coins dating from the last quarter of the 3rd century to the first decade of the 4th century.

[T]hese deposits should be seen … as a snapshot of complex monetary management, planned over the medium to long term, within a household or administration, capable of making deposits and withdrawals at various intervals. Initial analysis, observations made during the excavation do not appear to reveal hasty concealment: the vessels containing these coins were carefully placed in well-prepared pits, perfectly vertical thanks to the use of leveling stones. In two cases, the presence of a few coins found stuck to the outer face of the vessel clearly indicates that they were placed there after the vessel had been buried, before the pit was filled with sediment. Finally, the location of the two deposits discovered during the excavation, in apparently ordinary living rooms and at an altitude very close to that of the contemporary ground (the neck of the vases must have been flush with the surface), indicates that they remained easily accessible to their owner.

All hypotheses will be examined, but it is possible that there is a link between these three subcontemporary coin hoards—all buried, according to our current information, between 280 and 310 AD—and the known military occupation at Senon, attested by a fortification dating from the same period and located only 150 meters from the excavated area. This highlights the importance of documenting the archaeological context of these coin hoards, which will be clarified in the coming months through post-excavation studies. Their exceptional nature lies less in the discovery of a large quantity of coins (some thirty coin hoards are known in the Meuse department alone) than in the possibility of documenting their depositional context so precisely, which is rare. The fight against archaeological looting, which deprives scientific research and society as a whole of all this contextual information, is a crucial issue for understanding the motivations behind monetary deposits.

Happy Turkey Day!

Modern(ish), Museums

Today’s theme show is brought to you by Dutch Art Nouveau lithographer and illustrator Theo van Hoytema. He was born in The Hague in 1863, the son of the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Finance. His attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps went no further than a brief job at his brothers’ bank. Art was his true vocation, particularly drawings of animals. His first paid work as an artist were illustrations in scientific volumes.

Plants and animals, particularly birds, remained his favorite subjects, even when he branched out into non-fiction. In 1892, he published his first lithographed booklet, How the Birds Got a King, and achieved notable success with his 1893 follow-up, an illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling.

He earned his greatest fame with a series of lithograph calendars published every year from 1902 until 1918, the last of them published posthumously. Birds were again his main subjects, although other wildlife made it into the monthly illustrations too. Among the owls, cranes, peacocks and gulls in the van Hoytema oeuvre are several rather spectacular turkeys. They were originally imports to Europe, of course, but by the time Theo van Hoytema was capturing them in all their glory, turkeys had been staples of European husbandry for 400 years.

The New World native birds had first made landfall in Spain in 1511. These were turkeys domesticated by the Zapotecs a thousand years before, not the wild turkeys of New England, so they were much meatier and flightless. They were easy to raise, cheap to feed and could even be driven to market in flocks of hundreds. They were so well-established that by the end of the decade, domesticated European turkeys were being shipped back to the Americas with colonists as a source of reliable farmed protein.

Less than a decade after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, they were importing turkeys from England to establish flocks in the new colony. The actual first Thanksgiving in 1621 featured water fowl, hunted by the colonists, as the main dish, venison brought by the Wampanoag, plus seafood and possibly some local wild turkeys. But the kind of turkeys found on the modern Thanksgiving table are the products of Mexican turkeys bred for eight decades in different countries in Europe then returning to the Eastern seaboard where they made sweet love with the local wild populations to create the various American breeds of turkey that are now in every grocery store.

A gold posy ring and a Gunpowder Plot conspirator walk into a bar…

Modern(ish)

A 16th century gold posy ring found by a metal detectorist may have a connection to the Gunpowder Plot conspirators.

Posy rings were popular from the late Middle Ages through the 18th century, often given to loved ones at betrothals and weddings. While most posy rings were gifts between lovers or spouses, they were also meaningful tokens of friendship and faithfulness of a non-romantic type.

Their name is a reference to “poesy,” not a small bunch of flowers, because of the inscriptions on the interior surface that were declarations of love and loyalty. The inside of the ring is the part that makes contact with the skin, so the message was hidden to prying eyes and conveyed a special intimacy.

The recently-discovered posy ring is decorated on the outside face with a geometric relief that is deep enough it may have originally been filled with enamel. The interior surface is inscribed “YOVR . FRENDE . IN . DEEDE.” No inscription with this wording has been found before, and there are thousands documented. The separation between “in” and “deed” suggests the giver wanted the recipient to know he would prove himself loyal in actions, not just words.

It was found in May of 2022 next to the moat of Bushwood Hall in Lapworth, the place where Robert Catesby, the leader of the Gunpowder Plot, was born. The current half-timber manor house was built 15 years after Catesby was killed for his role in the plot to blow up Parliament, but the moat around it also encircled the previous house which had belonged to the Catesby family since the 15th century.

Robert Catesby was born there in 1572, and after the death of his Protestant wife in 1598, he returned to his family’s undercover Catholic faith. Elizabeth I had outlawed Catholicism in 1570 after she was excommunicated, so Catholics were forced to attend Anglican churches or face fines, imprisonment and persecution. Many Catholics went underground, literally, practicing their faith in secret in hidden rooms. Those who refused to publicly disavow their faith were known as recusant Catholics.

When James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots who had herself been executed by Elizabeth, ascended the throne in 1603, English Catholics had reason for optimism that the new king would loosen up the chains. He didn’t. He mistrusted the powerful Catholic families and was just as ruthless in suppressing the religion as Elizabeth had been.

Early in 1604, Catesby hatched a plan to blow up the King and the House of Lords with gunpowder during the State Opening of Parliament on November 5th, 1605, and install James’ nine-year-old daughter Princess Elizabeth as their puppet queen. He recruited other Catholics, including Eighty Years’ War and Franco-Spanish War veteran Guy Fawkes, to join the plot. An anonymous letter alerted authorities to the danger, and on the night before the explosion was set to go off, Guy Fawkes was found in a cellar under the Parliament building guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder. He was arrested and the other plotters ran. Catesby was tracked down by a sheriff’s posse and was fatally shot at Holbeche House on November 8th. He was 33.

At the time of the plot, Catesby was living at another of the family properties at Ashby St Ledgers on the Warwickshire/Northamptonshire border near Rugby. But Bushwood Hall was the base for the other plotters, with Catesby using it to stockpile weapons and supplies. It was also home to one of the key conspirators, John Wright, who had been at school with Guy Fawkes in York.

It was also only accessed via a one-way road, so there was no passing traffic, and any valuable lost along the way likely belonged to someone who lived there or someone who had dealings with them.

In conclusion, there is no verifiable direct link between this ring and any of the Gunpowder conspirators, but the find site, inscription and dating make it a tantalizingly plausible hypothesis.

The posy ring is going up for auction on November 27th with a presale estimate of £8,000-£12,000 ($10,550-$15,830).