Preserving our ancient canoes
Irecently paid a visit to the newly opened River Center in Benton’s Riverside Park where I was able to see a prehistoric dugout canoe. Known as the Peeler Bend Canoe due to it having been found at Peeler Bend on the nearby Saline River, this 800-year-old craft is in remarkably good shape and it contributes nicely to the new community center.
Charles Greene of Benton, who often fished the Saline, discovered the canoe in August 1999. Greene, now age 82, recalled recently for the
Benton Courier newspaper that he usually fished the Peeler Bend area about every three weeks. He had seen the canoe earlier, but assumed it was merely an old log mostly buried in mud.
In the late summer of 1999 Green decided to take a look at the “log” because it seemed unusual: “The water was low, so I waded over to it, and I looked down, and it was too straight for it to be a log. The next week I took my shovel and ran my hand down [the canoe] and it was real smooth. I knew then it wasn’t a log.”
Since the canoe was found in the bed of a navigable waterway, it was deemed to be the property of the state, so it was sent to Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock for preservation treatment.
According to Mary Beth Trubitt, archaeologist at the Arkansas Archeological Survey Station at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, the canoe measures 24 feet in length and the width averages 26 inches. The canoe was made from a yellow pine log. It was constructed using fire followed by scraping out the charred wood. A knot, where a branch had once been, was left at the front of the canoe, which Trubitt says “might have been used in maneuvering or mooring the boat.”
In an attempt to date the canoe, two samples of wood were taken by the Archeological Survey and submitted to radiocarbon dating—producing an age of about 800 years.
Digging the canoe from the muck of the Saline River was merely the beginning of its rescue. As State Archeologist Ann M. Early wrote in a recent email, “Water-saturated wooden objects require a long and expensive stabilization and conservation process … If that isn’t carried out, the cellular structure collapses and the object falls apart.”
Fortunately, Historic Arkansas Museum has a professional museum conservator on its staff, Andy Zawacki, who oversaw drawn-out and costly efforts to preserve the canoe. A long vat was acquired, and the canoe was submerged in polyethylene glycol for about two years.
The Peeler Bend Canoe is not the only one found in Arkansas or even the Saline River. In the winter of 1982-83 a canoe was found on the Saline River property of A.F. Griggs. The canoe lacked one inch of being 24 feet in length.
The Griggs canoe is different from the other three early canoes found in Arkansas. First, it is much later in manufacture—possibly as late as the 1840s. Second, it was made using a metal tool, so it might have been made by non-Indians. The Griggs canoe is on permanent exhibit at Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park.
In the spring of 2008 a prehistoric canoe was found on the St. Francis River in Cross County. Discovered by Matt Guth of Wynne, the canoe was made of bald cypress using the burn-andscrape method. Radiocarbon dating established a manufacture date ranging from AD 1310-1450.
Ultimately, the privately-owned St. Francis canoe was sold to the Illinois State Archaeologist Society, which donated the boat to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois.
In 1991 a prehistoric canoe was found at the mouth of the Caddo River. Little is known about this canoe because it was badly neglected at first. It was dug up in secret and kept hidden for some time. Known as the Arkadelphia Canoe, the boat was ultimately donated to the Archeological Survey’s Research Station at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia. Radiocarbon dating established its age as 1,050 years, the oldest of the four canoes found in the state. It was made of yellow pine and was at least 18 feet in length. The Arkadelphia Canoe has essentially fallen apart.
It is likely that more prehistoric canoes lie beneath the rivers of Arkansas. A large number of prehistoric canoes, some as old as 5,000 years, have been found in Florida. Indeed, in the late 1990s a single dry lake in Florida yielded 86 canoes.
Due to the high cost of preservation, the Florida canoes were reburied after they were documented and samples taken for dating and wood identification. State Archaeologist Early notes that archeologists throughout the Southeast “work under the mandate that the best strategy for taking care of submerged wooded objects is preservation in place.”