After 1,200 years, a canoe was found at the bottom of Lake Mendota in Wisconsin by a team of divers and archaeologists.
The canoe was 27 feet underwater, and the divers carefully extracted it from the lake sediment it was buried under. After removing it from the sediment, the canoe was pulled to a beach in Madison's Spring Harbor neighborhood.
A Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologist, Tamara Thomsen, was scuba diving for fun over the summer when she happened to come across what is now the oldest fully intact dugout canoe in Wisconsin.
A state archaeologist, James Skibo, shared that there are not many fully intact relics like the canoe found or in the state's possession.
"Ninety-nine percent of the archaeological record is trash — broken things, things people have thrown away. Rarely do we find something that was lost or deposited as a whole thing," Skibo said.
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Thomsen, who is also a master scuba instructor for the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, spotted the craft in June, and she shared it was something she had never seen before.
"I'm underwater an awful lot," Thomsen said. "I've never seen this underwater [before], and I don't think I'll ever get to again in my career."
According to carbon dating done by the archaeologists on a sliver of wood before the canoe was lifted from the lake, it was used around A.D. 800.
The boat is expected to give experts more information on early NAtive Americans who lived in the Madison area at the time and built effigy mounds still present today, USA Today reported.
Thomsen shared that she first thought that the canoe was something built by the Boy Scouts in the 1950s; if not for the carbon dating, it may not have been recovered.
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The carbon dating also made the clock start to tick on the removal process since organisms were infiltrating the canoe's wood in the lake.
"They said if it's not brought up, it will disintegrate fairly rapidly. So everything went into high gear," archaeologist Amy Rosebrough said.
The canoe is currently being preserved for archaeologists to study and observe.