In Latvia, the country’s first underwater dig found a fishing spear possibly up to 11,000 years old

Researchers in Latvia have carried out what the Latvian Academy of Culture calls the country’s first underwater archaeological excavation. In Lake Indzers, in the Vidzeme region, a team working around a small island called Cepūrīte found pottery, animal bones and a barbed bone fishing spear that they provisionally date to the Mesolithic, roughly 8,000 to 11,000 years ago. The island itself also looks like an unusual kind of settlement.

An island first noticed in 1983

Archaeologist Māris Atgāzis first identified Cepūrīte Island as an ancient settlement in 1983. The team came back in 2025 and found deposits across the whole island, not just in one corner. That survey also brought up two intact clay vessels and animal bones from the lakebed, plus a flint flake that may be a scraper. The finds set up the 2026 fieldwork, which took place in early August.

The work belongs to a project called “Archaeological Heritage of Inland Waters: Islands and Lake Dwellings in Latvian Lakes.” It runs from 2025 to 2027 and has €300,000 in funding from the Latvian Council of Science. Juris Urtāns directs the excavation, with archaeologists Agnese Čakare and Kaspars Markuss Molls, and divers Saulvedis Vārpiņš and Laimnesis Markūns from the Association of Underwater Cultural and Historical Heritage.

What the team did and found

On land, the team excavated 10 square metres and found a cultural layer about half a metre thick across much of the island. Underwater, divers recorded material up to about 12 metres from the shore and carried out small excavations at a depth of 2.5 metres. The finds include pottery fragments, among them large vessel fragments and several preserved vessel bases, along with animal bones, split stones and stones that carry fire marks.

Most of the pottery dates to the second half of the first millennium AD and resembles material linked to ancient Latgalian communities. A human femur gave a radiocarbon date of AD 578 to 654, although the team has not confirmed that the bone belongs to the people who lived on the island.

The spear, and how sure the date is

The oldest object is a barbed bone fishing spear, possibly made for large fish. The researchers provisionally date it to the Middle or Late Mesolithic, between the ninth and sixth millennia BC, which works out to about 8,000 to 11,000 years old. That date comes from the spear’s type and style, not from a laboratory test, so it carries real uncertainty. The team also does not yet know how the objects reached the lakebed.

A settlement that does not fit the usual pattern

Latvia has other known lake dwellings, and they usually rest on wooden piles or platforms. Cepūrīte shows no wooden piles or platforms. The excavation director suggests it may represent a previously unrecognized type of island habitat that combines features of a land settlement and a lake dwelling. He offers that as a possibility, not a conclusion.

The island is small, and the team notes it may be too small to have housed everyone linked to the lake’s cemeteries. That suggests other settlements may have stood around the lake. The researchers also point out that prehistoric people may have visited the lake to fish without ever living on the island. Preliminary checks on two other islands, Liepu and Stradu, showed no comparable deposits.

What happens next

The project runs until 2027, so more fieldwork should follow. No journal paper has appeared yet, so the details above come from the Latvian Academy of Culture’s account as relayed by Arkeonews.

Sources: Arkeonews (Oguz Buyukyildirim, 27 October 2026), based on information from the Latvian Academy of Culture. No journal paper or DOI is available yet. Lead image: underwater excavation near Cepūrīte Island, K. M. Molls / Latvian Academy of Culture.