If you’re like me, you’ve spent some time this summer paddling a canoe around the rivers and lakes of our region, traveling, fishing, or just drifting idly in the sun. When you’re out there in your narrow boat on the rippling waters, you’re part of a very long tradition, one that dates back millennia, and spans not just this province but across continents.
Here in Secwepemculewc, traditional canoes were made of cottonwood trees, hollowed out then stretched open by steaming the wood. On the coast, dugout cedar canoes dominated. To the east, wood framed canoes with bark skins were used to plow up and down the Columbia.
These boats were the foundation of a transportation network that linked people across the northwest and to river systems beyond. All these styles produced watercraft that ranged from single-person skiffs to cargo canoes capable of hauling tons of goods, boats that fostered wide and sustained economic systems as well as personal freedom and exploration.
The archaeological record of canoeing is choppy, but continuous. We can’t say for sure how long people have been making boats like this, because the evidence of wood, bark and pitch decays and gets lost to time in most parts of the world.
The oldest dated canoe in the world was found in the Netherlands, and dates to around 8,000 years old. In Florida, where the highest concentration of archaeological dugout canoes are known, almost 7,000 years of canoeing technology has been documented.
Mucky, still waters create the best conditions for preserving archaeological canoes. Submerged in drifting silts and clays, otherwise fragile boats can be held together until they’re revealed when water levels drop. Once exposed to air, these vessels quickly decay.
In BC, where swift moving or salty waters dominate, the physical remains of ancient canoes are rare. Instead, we infer canoe making from the tools and remnants of the canoe-making process.
Adze blades (sharp nephrite or jadeite bits used like giant chisels), stone hammers, and wedges form part of heavy-duty woodworking toolkits associated with whole-tree processing. Fire-cracked rock is left behind in huge quantities when logs are filled with water and heated cobbles to steam and stretch boat bodies. In some places, distinctive les of wood chips can mark boatmaking sites.
Occasionally, the roughed out shape of a canoe has been found on the forest floor. One such blank found in Haida Gwai in the 1980s was abandoned during manufacture more than a century before, left next to the stump from which the log was felled.
Together, these clues tell a story of how people fashioned boats from trees, and, over decades or centuries or millennia, figured out the best way to live in watery places.
Worldwide, canoes have been a way of getting people around in environments that were too deep, too swampy, too swift or just simply too big to traverse by foot. They are one ingenious solution to a planet made mostly of water.