Oak Island Archaeology Update: Is the decorated copper object a gorget?

The Curse of Oak Island (COOI) E06S10 brought us one of the more interesting finds of the team in a long time. As an archaeologist, I am of course interested in old ox shoes and random fragments of stoves dumped in fill. We can learn a lot from those, from their spatial distribution, from their associations, etc. But I must admit that even I breathe a sigh of relief when something like last week’s decorated copper plate comes out of one of Gary’s excursions.

The decorated copper object

So what is that thing? As always, we only know what they show us on COOI. It is a metal sheet, about 95% copper and 5% zinc, which makes it brass, it is folded, and has quite intricate designs that seem to be repoussé. Laird says his first thought is that it is military. My first thought is closely related to that also.

This is pure speculation here, but I think it might be a gorget, which is an ornament worn around the neck, sometimes over the throat (hence the name from the French for throat: gorge). These were often part of European military uniforms, and also worn by North American Indigenous warriors. The British gave gorgets to their Mi’kmaw allies at the end of the War of 1812, for example. The decoration on this one suggests an Indigenous origin more than European one.

A Caddoan Mississippian culture ”Craig style” shell gorget from the Spiro Mounds Site in eastern Oklahoma.

Indigenous gorgets have been made and used for thousands of years. They were originally made of bone, slate, or sometimes native copper (i.e. copper found in metallic form in nature). They were important symbols of status and were often elaborately decorated.

But while the decoration on this one is more indigenous than European, the composition of the metal suggests that it comes from a European source, and is therefore no older than the 1500s. Indigenous people have worked copper in the Americas for thousands of years, but I am not aware of any brass being produced, and native, or naturally occurring brass alloys don’t seem to occur in the deposits that were exploited in the Great Lakes region, for example.

The object could be cut from a trade kettle. These were copper or brass kettles exchanged by European traders to Indigenous groups starting in the 1500s.  Anselmi et al. found some brass trade kettles in Ontario with as low as 6% zinc content. 

Meanwhile, Pavlish et al. strongly suggest that brass becomes more frequent relative to copper in archaeological sites in the Northeast as time progresses. Brass is almost absent in the 1500s, and becomes dominant in the mid 1600s, which would help us date this thing if it is indeed a reworked piece of a trade kettle. Trade kettles were often cut up and reworked like that into ornaments, tinkling cones for dancing outfits, tools, etc.

When Laird said that the object was folded over, I immediately thought of the lugs of brass trade kettles, which were often folded. But then Laird specified that it is folded three times over, which I think would be unusual for a simple kettle lug.

Another possibility is that the object is made of gilding metal, sometimes known as Pinchbeck, which has a very similar composition, and is prized for its resemblance to gold. It was used for ornaments, plates, and things like military badges. It was manufactured in the UK starting in the early 1700s.

Unfortunately, the decoration on the object is of little help for either dating it or pinning down its origin. As Ed Barnhart appropriately notes on the episode, geometry is everywhere. People have used it in all kinds of places, at all kinds of time, for all kinds of purposes. His inclusion as an expert on the show suggests that the COOI team might be thinking of giving this object a Central American origin. We’ll see where they go with this.

If I had to take a wild guess right now, based only on the information I saw on the episode, I would say that the object is probably a Mi’kmaw gorget, probably made from trade brass, probably in the late 1700s.

But who really knows? It could also be a small piece of a larger object that we would recognize immediately if we saw it in its context. All we have to go on is what we have. Which is often the case in archaeology.