MADISON, Wis. — Tamara Thomsen has spent her career underwater finding, documenting and preserving pieces of Wisconsin history.
Thomsen is a maritime archaeologist for the Wisconsin Historical Society. Growing up, she always wanted to scuba dive.
“I begged my father, ‘can I take scuba lessons?’ He said ‘next year, next year,’ hoping I’d forget,” Thomsen said. “Then when I came to school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it was offered as a class.”
She had found her passion and joined the Wisconsin Historical Society about 20 years ago.
“The state archaeologist at the time said, ‘you can stay here until someone better comes along,’” Thomsen remembered. “I proved him wrong.”
When it comes to marine archaeology in the Midwest, it doesn’t get much better than Thomsen. Most of her work is in exploring and photographing shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. She’s even in the Women Divers Hall of Fame.
She loves being on the water, especially in Madison.
“The sun is warm on your skin. There’s not too much of a breeze,” she said. “Being out on the lakes is so amazing.”
She came across some of her most notable discoveries on Lake Mendota. It all happened by accident, starting in spring 2021.
“I was off duty. One of these weird things that underwater archaeologists do is we like to actually go diving when we don’t have to,” Thomsen laughed. “I was out in Lake Mendota and swimming around with a friend… where my dive buddy stopped was right over the exposed end of a dugout canoe.”
Then, less than a year later, in the same area, she found another.
The discoveries were met with great fanfare. The notoriety came from around the world, but the canoes hold deep significance for Indigenous people. They were made by ancestors of the Ho Chunk Nation, when Madison was known as Teejop. One of them was 1,200 years old. The second canoe Thomsen found was 3,000 years old.
“It’s just mind-blowing,” she said.
Thomsen said a highlight of her career is when a Ho Chunk woman saw one of the recovered canoes for the first time.
“She just started crying. It was very, very emotional,” Thomsen said. “She said ‘you know, I live three blocks from here. I always knew our people were here, but this is so real to me now. This is where we belong.’”
Being part of the canoes’ stories, and working directly with Ho Chunk leaders, will forever be a part of her legacy.
“With the removal of the canoes, with the cleaning of the canoes, we’ve had a lot of tribal elders come in and help us,” she said. “It’s probably the most meaningful thing that I’ve found.”
The canoes are currently in water at the State Preservation Archives. Soon, they’ll go through a chemical process that will remove the water and replace it with a preservative, which may take a couple years. The goal is to have them on display at the Historical Society’s new museum in 2027.