Oak Island archaeology update: A Serpent Mound and an ancient Chinese coin?

The last few episodes of Season 8 of The Curse of Oak Island (COOI) have focused on the possibility that there is a serpent mount on Lot 15, and that the team found an ancient Chinese coin on the Island. Let’s start with the Serpent Mound.

Serpent mounds are part of a larger class of effigy mounds found mainly in the Midwestern and Eastern US. They are shaped like animals and were built by indigenous communities between about 3000 and 700 years ago, although dating is often uncertain, and at least some mounds, like The Great Serpent Mound of Ohio, represent several construction episodes over about 1000 years (See Herrmann et al 2014).

There is a well-known serpent mound in Ontario, Canada, which is approximately 2000 years old. The group of mounds at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa are between 1400 and 800 years old. Finding a serpent mound on Oak Island in Nova Scotia would be very interesting, but definitely not shocking. I am not aware that there are other effigy mounds in the Maritimes, but there is a local tradition of monumental construction, including mounds, known as the Maritime Archaic Tradition, although these tend to be older than the Midwestern effigy mounds.

Is there an effigy mound on Lot 15?

Saying that there could be a serpent mound on Lot 15 is not the same as saying that there is. It is very hard to tell these things from TV pictures alone, but there are a few features of the proposed mound that do stand out. First, the sides of the mound are steep and sharp (Figure 1). This is not consistent with older structures, which tend to become rounded and deflated over time.

Figure 1: A very sharp edge on the mound

Second, some sections seem to have a sharp double ridge at the top. This is more consistent with a bulldozer push than with traditional mound building. At least one section looks U-shaped and is lined with boulders (Figure 2). It looks more like the foundation of something not terribly old, than like a traditional mound.

Figure 2: U-shaped, boulder lined section

Much is made by the COOI team of the fact that there is a carbon date of circa 1200 AD from a piece of charcoal recovered from the mound, along with an iron nail. Their interpretation is that this points to a 1200 year old European structure, possibly related to the Knights Templar.

We know that Oak Island has been heavily shaped by colonial, industrial, and searcher activity over the past 200 years. It isn’t surprising, therefore to find a pile of earth and boulders with mixed material in it from different time period. For example, a bulldozer push would mix 800 year old charcoal with 50 year old nails in a single pile with no trouble.

Piling up of earth and boulders for a foundation can even result in inversion, a phenomenon in which the oldest material ends up at the top of the pile, and the youngest material at the bottom.

Just for interest I’ll also note that the u-shaped, boulder lined structure in Figure 2 looks a lot like explosives storage pens I have seen near dam construction sites while out surveying for archaeological sites. We know that there was blasting on the island during some of the 19^th century searches.

In other words, as always, there are a number of more likely possibilities to rule out before we conclude that there is a Serpent mound on Oak Island, as cool as it would be. And the effigy mound possibility itself is close infinitely more likely than the Templar mound theory. As always, I look forward to hearing more from the archaeologists working on the island.

The coin

I kept the coin for last, because there honestly is not much to say about it for the moment. The team found a thin disk of copper or copper alloy with a squarish hole in the middle. Sandy Campbell, who owns a coin shop in Nova Scotia and who must know his business, identified it as an ancient Chinese Coin, perhaps more than 1000 years old.

The object is very degraded, almost featureless, and any purely visual, macroscopic identification must be considered very tentative. It is morphologically like some old Chinese coins. That’s pretty much anyone can say at the moment. I would wait for metallurgical information, at the very least, before jumping to any conclusions.

Even if it is an ancient Chinese coin, the analyst provides a very reasonable explanation for its presence on the island, and doesn’t seem surprised. Someone in the 18^th or 19^th century could have just carried it around as a memento or a curio. So much for the coin.