This article is part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting women who have forged new paths.
To Tamara Thomsen, shipwrecks are not tragedies frozen in time — they are stories waiting to resurface.
As a maritime archaeologist in Wisconsin, in the American Midwest, she spends many of her days descending into the Great Lakes to uncover lives and moments that have been submerged for centuries.
“Shipwrecks are time capsules of the past,” she said. “They tell us about the people who were onboard, what their lives were like, and the evolution of design with respect to shipbuilding.”
Ms. Thomsen credits her career, in part, to a scuba diving class she took as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She later became a diving instructor to help pay for graduate school. “When I got my master’s, I knew I wanted to figure out a way to combine science and my love of being underwater,” Ms. Thomsen said.
She started working with the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Maritime Preservation and Archaeology team in 2003. Since, Ms. Thomsen has helped unearth more than 100 shipwrecks across the Great Lakes. In 2014, she was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.
Ms. Thomsen, 56, lives in Madison, where she also owns and operates Diversions Scuba, which sells dive gear and offers diving classes. She was interviewed by phone and email. The conversations were edited and condensed.
What are some challenging or misunderstood components of your work as an underwater archaeologist?
Most people don’t realize that my job is not entirely diving and field work. In Wisconsin, the winters are long and sometimes brutal, so that really leaves us with five or six months to be in the lakes. During the field season, we try to mine every day, aiming to find and research three or four wrecks.
I spend the rest of my time seeking grant funding to support fieldwork, reporting on current grant work, giving public presentations about the wrecks I’ve found, and repairing field equipment.
When you are facing difficult diving conditions, how do you mentally prepare?
I find it difficult when the water isn’t clear, when there is a strong current, or when the water is very deep. I’m at a physical risk, and these conditions can be nerve-racking. My way to overcome my fear is to spend a lot of time in the water getting comfortable when I’m not working.
But the hardest condition is working on sites where you know you may encounter human remains. Some are the final resting places of sailors who lived, worked and sometimes died on these ships — their remains need to be treated with reverence. I prep mentally by taking a deep breath and diving in, aware of what I may find.
Coastal areas get the attention in your field. Why are the Great Lakes a good place to be a maritime archaeologist?
Our wooden and metal shipwrecks are among the best-preserved in the world. Many Great Lakes states have had laws since the 1960s to protect them from looting. With so many discoveries in recent years, and preservation laws protecting them, some look exactly as they did when they went to the bottom 100 or 150 years ago. There’s nothing more exciting than having this setting to work in.
Why is it important to document and preserve shipwrecks, and what value does this bring to communities in Wisconsin?
Our mission at the Wisconsin Historical Society is to connect people to the past by collecting, preserving and sharing stories. Shipwrecks are an important piece of that work because they illustrate stories from the time about commercial watercraft, immigration, settlement, commodity trade and shipbuilding.
Before there were road and rail networks, the easiest way to get here was by water. Ships brought in immigrants, and, as settlement expanded, industries like fur trading, lumbering and mining boomed. The grain centers of Milwaukee and Chicago sat at the western end of an expansive water highway that connected these blossoming ports with the markets of the east.
Each shipwreck tells a story of connectivity within this trade network, as well as the human stories that played a role in every journey, including the crew, the shipbuilders and the port workers.
Of the projects you have worked on, which has been the most compelling and why?
It wasn’t a shipwreck, actually. Between 2021 and this spring, I found 16 ancient dugout canoes in Lake Mendota in Madison. They’re between 900 and 5,200 years old. I recovered two of them and left the rest as-is after consulting with 11 local tribes. Their preservation officers felt that these canoes told a better story if left untouched.
It was a new and moving experience for me working with these tribal communities and learning about how these canoes connect them to their ancestors. Many were moved to tears.
The technology used in underwater archaeology has evolved significantly. How has it changed your work in the field?
Photogrammetry has really been a game-changer. For deep shipwrecks in particular, we collect data to create a 3-D model. These models are produced to scale, so we can take accurate measurements of the wrecks in the lab.
If you have a wreck you are working on and it’s deep, the time you can spend on the bottom might be limited by how much decompression [stops before you can come to the surface] you need and how much gas you can carry. Models allow some observations to be made in the lab rather than adding to dive time and risk on the bottom.
Also, in water with marginal clarity, you may be able to see a part of a shipwreck, but a model will allow you to visualize the whole wreck and its debris field.
These models are beautiful and impactful imagery that can be shared with the public and used to build stewardship in the preservation of our submerged cultural resources.
What challenges have you encountered professionally because of your gender?
I interact with many male maritime historians, wreck hunters, and avocational archaeologists in my role, and have had my fair share of being underestimated, whether that’s being told I wouldn’t understand a piece of technology or having historical narratives overexplained.
What advice would you give to young people who are interested in a career as a maritime archaeologist?
Learn to scuba dive and practice diving — there’s more to it than just getting your certification.
You need to be comfortable underwater and in control of your life support to the extent that you can concentrate on collecting data. Yet, in a flash, you need to be able to shift and respond to any issues as second nature.
Spend more time learning science, math, engineering, statistics and even art; interdisciplinary work is the next wave of the discipline.
The post She Helps Unearth the Submerged History of the Great Lakes appeared first on New York Times.
