That's what the Ho Chunk people called it back in 1830 when they told the pioneers about the "rock tepees" at the bottom of the lake.
What does "Tyranena" mean? The Ho Chunk did not know. It was an old name. They knew only that the rocks at the bottom of the lake concealed the dead of an "alien people."
The pioneers shrugged. They renamed the place Rock Lake.
Rock Lake is located between Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin, just south of Highway I-94, and it was ignored for many years. Even after the discovery of ancient Aztalan, a few miles away, even after scientists concluded that a community of nearly 200,000 must have lived at Aztalan, on the shores of Lake Mills, the stories about Rock Lake were forgotten and ignored.
Only in 1901, when a severe drought caused the water levels of Rock Lake to fall, and a pair of duck hunters, Claude and Lee Wilson, saw beneath them in the clear waters a pyramidal mound of black stone did the local legend leap back to life.
The Wilson brothers brought back friends from town, and the excited group took turns diving. They confirmed it was a pyramid of some kind.
By the time a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal arrived, however, a recent rain had caused the water level to rise, and the pyramid was hidden once again by dark water and green algae. The Wilsons were mocked and scorned by the newspaper. They took it hard and kept their mouths shut for the next few decades.
During the 1940s, Victor Taylor, a Lake Mills resident who believed in the Wilson brothers, took his boat out onto Rock Lake and rowed its entire 2.5 mile length in efforts to find the pyramid beneath the waves. He too was ribbed and mocked.
It is largely thanks to Archie Eschborn, who founded the Rock Lake Research Society in 1997, that we now know a small part of the truth. Eschborn organized a team of experts equipped with expensive cameras, side-scanning sonar and modern Global Positioning Systems. After some aerial photography and several boating expeditions, images of man-made objects were finally captured.
Archaeologists now agree that more than 1,100 pre-historic, man-made structures lie at the bottom of Rock Lake.
The structures include a wall (150 feet long, twelve feet wide, with right-angle geometry and perfectly straight), a pyramid mound, a rock formation called "the seven sisters" because the pattern of stones resembles the Pleiades star formation, and the sculpture of a "dragon" (an 84-foot serpentine structure with a horse-like head).
Sources:
Eschborn, Archie. "A Dragon in Rock Lake," Ch. 22 of The Lost Worlds of Ancient America (Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books, 2012), pp. 140 - 148
