Mississippi River Folk: Dugout Canoe Form, Function, and Frequency in the Magnolia State

Summary

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1986, Sam McGahey published the first compendium of Mississippi dugout canoes. He listed the attributes of eight watercraft including recovery location, date of manufacture, wood type, method of construction, and dimensions. McGahey also included a composite drawing to better facilitate comparison. While dugouts are only infrequently encountered, they reveal key information about the means and mechanics of transportation and encode information about identity, subsistence, trade, migration, and warfare otherwise invisible in the archaeological record. Further inhibiting our understanding of this important artifact type is the cost of preservation and inconsistency of documentation. When resources allow, dugouts are installed as the centerpieces of exhibits, such as the Swan Lake Canoe on display at the Museum of Mississippi History. In other instances, they are pulled from a riverbank or lake bed and left to quickly deteriorate. This paper updates McGahey’s list of canoes and surveys the variation present within the Magnolia State. We seek to encourage local reporting of dugouts as they are recovered by fostering relationships with avocational communities, and explore expedient, standardized means of documenting form through the creation of high-quality models. We conclude by reflecting on the current state of dugout research and highlighting future avenues of study.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41544.0