Dugout canoe discovered at Squam Lake dated to 17th century

HOLDERNESS — Recovered from Squam Lake 81 years ago, a dugout canoe has now been dated to the mid-17th century, a hundred years before Holderness was founded. The test to establish the timeline was provided by the PaleoResearch Institute in Golden, Colo., and conveyed to the Holderness Historical Society, custodial curators of the dugout.

The dugout was discovered by chance by three fishermen from Tilton in fall 1939 under 14 feet of water in Veerie Cove along the lake's northwest shore. Lacking local interest, it found its way to Tilton, then the Shelburne Museum in Vermont where it was identified as Native American in origin. In January 2019, the society was asked to return the canoe to Squam. Last July, volunteers brought the canoe back to Holderness. Since its return, local interest has been high, with visitation to the society’s building at Curry Place increased tenfold.

The canoe was fashioned from a felled tree trunk by burning its top surface, then scraping away the charred wood and burning again with repeated gouging with stone tools. The procedure for dating the artifact consists of taking a small sample of the wood and exposing it to a series of stress tests. Freeze-drying it to -107 degrees Celsius to remove moisture, then heating the wood sliver to 110 degrees Celsius to remove any trace of iron and calcium carbonates. The sample was placed inside a quartz tube with cupric oxide and silver added, then hydrogen flame-sealed under vacuum and combusted at 820 degrees Celsius.

The residue was sent on to the Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry lab at the University of California to determine how much carbon-14 had been given off since the tree had been cut. This helped determine how long ago the canoe was built.

Experts theorize it is native of the Early Contact Period, since there are no saw or metal tool marks evident, it has an upturned stern with upturned bow, and thin gunwale sides of varying thicknesses. By the mid-1600s, the more maneuverable birch bark canoe had replaced the cumbersome dugout so this Squam Lake artifact was most likely abandoned at that time. In 1751 the king’s surveyor Samuel Lane, visiting to lay out by chain and compass what would become New Holderness, noted the presence of cornfields, charcoal pits and other signs of native occupancy above Livermore Falls where he started his survey. The species of wood used to make the dugout and its age at the time it was cut remain to be determined by foresters who will visit later this spring.