Curse of Oak Island Archaeology Update: Roman coins on Lot 5

The two hour opener of Season 11 heavily features the discovery of coins, both Roman and Medieval, on Lot 5, near and around the circular depression. As always, we can ask ourselves how surprising and how significant these finds are, and what they might mean.

Do the coins indicate treasure?

The coins found on Lot 5 are essentially coppers. The Hoxne hoard, found in England in the 90s, is the largest roman treasure known to date. It contains hundreds of gold solidii, thousands of silver coins, and just a few bronze ones. That’s a treasure. The coins from Lot 5 are closer to daily pocket change than to treasure. 

One of the Roman coins from Lot 5

How did the coins get to oak island?

Despite this treasure downer, it’s still very interesting to think about how a bunch of Roman coins made it to Oak Island and were discovered in an ostensibly 17th-19th century context. Archaeologists, historians, and treasure hunters have long wondered whether stray finds of ancient European coins in North America could support the idea of pre-Colombian transatlantic voyages. In 1980, Jeremiah Epstein of the University of Texas at Austin published in the journal Current Anthropology a fairly comprehensive (at the time) survey of ancient coin finds in the US.

As is the practice in Current Anthropology, his article is accompanied by commentary from a wide range of scholars, and a reply by the author. The article and the discussion show that there was a lively debate at that time between a diffusionist school of archaeology that favoured early and frequent transatlantic contact, and a majority of scholars less receptive to the idea.

Epstein’s survey evaluates the context of various coin finds and the reliability of information available about them. The conclusion is that in most cases, the coins are likely to be recent (post-WWII) imports lost by their owners in the US. There are a small number of coins that don’t fit that description.

Was there a coin collector on Oak island?

Apart from being lost as strays by people who brought them back from Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa, Roman coins can appear as part of collections in archaeological context. The fact that three roman and at least one medieval coin were found on Lot 5, in close proximity to each other, argues against random loss. The finds are clustered in a way that stray finds usually aren’t. Randomly lost coins, as we see from Epstein’s 1980 survey, are usually found alone.

European coin collecting as a hobby goes back at least to the middle ages, and probably earlier. It’s entirely possible that one of the early European settlers of Oak Island kept a coin collection, or perhaps just had a particular interest in Roman coins.

This possibility is difficult to evaluate. Perhaps some information can be found in family histories. Maybe someone has an ancestor who lived on Oak Island and has a box of old coins in their basement, handed down in the family over the generations. Who knows.

Ballast

There is another mechanism for bringing ancient European coins to North America that I think fits the context and chronology of Oak Island much better. From the sixteenth century to the early 1900s, sailing ships often arrived in the Americas “in ballast.” The goods they were carrying to colonial markets were less bulky and heavy than the products they would bring back to Europe.

In order to improve the sailing characteristics of their ships, sailors often loaded them with ballast taken from European harbours. This could include rocks, sandbags filled locally, or any other junk found on the shore that was the right size and heavy enough for the purpose.

On arrival in an American harbour, sailors would bring their cargo ashore and also dump their ballast before reloading with colonial products. As early as 1968, Emery et al published in the journal Science a survey of European flint nodules, including sometimes paleolithic stone tools, found on American shores as a result of ballast dumping.

When the ballast consisted of sand or smaller gravel taken from a European shore, smaller archaeological objects were sometimes carried to the Americas and redeposited as ballast dumps. In a recent article, Wilksinson discusses ballast coins from Europe found in the Americas.

We’ve learned over time that ballast finds are not restricted to ballast dump sites. Ballast was often reused locally for landscaping, fill, roadwork, etc, both by governments and by individual landowners. And ballast was not found uniquely to be found on the shore next to piers and wharves, as might be expected.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, ballast dumping rapidly became a problem for local authorities for harbour maintenance and access. A number of jurisdictions passed laws and ordinances that ballast had to be dumped above the high tide line, for example.

Ballast archaeology is a thing in Nova Scotia, by the way. This report from 1996, for example, mentions ballast no fewer than 5 times. One of the most fascinating aspects of ballast archaeology is that objects were often moved around the Mediterranean and European Atlantic coast through ballast loading and dumping before they even got to the Americas. 

A coin taken on as part of ballast in Rhodes could be dumped in Marseilles, taken up again from a ballast dump, carried to La Rochelle, dumped again, taken on with a paleolithic flint artifact, and carried to Massachusetts, or maybe Mahone bay, and dumped there to be found in 2023. Ballast can really mix things up and create some hellacious puzzles for archaeologists and historians. We ignore it at our interpretive peril.

We know from the archaeology done on Oak Island so far that a lot of farming happened there starting at least in the mid-1700s, and some light industry as well. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if ships regularly dumped some ballast at the island, and if some of its landowners reused the ballast for their own purposes (in building for example). It wouldn’t even be surprising if ballast dumps from the mainland were transported and reused on Oak Island. Some of that ballast may have contained Roman coins.

Conclusion

In other words, there are a number of possibilities for how those Roman coins made their way to Lot 5, and the least likely of them is that they were part of a medieval Templar treasure. Could the coins have been planted? Sure. Oak Island has a long history of hyping and searching for investors. But then why plant them, away from the Money Pit, and not use them?

They are not likely to be individual losses. They could be part of a collection made by a former resident, but they are most likely to have been brought over and dumped as ballast.

References

Emery et al. 1968. European Cretaceous Flints on the Coast of North America, Science 160:1225-1228.

Epstein JF 1980. Pre-Columbian Old World Coins in America: An Examination of the Evidence, Current Anthropology, 21:1-20.

Powell S (ed) 1996. Archaeology in Nova Scotia 1991, Department of Education and Culture.

Wilkinson RH 2020. Identifying Ancient Coins Deposited with Modern Ships’ Ballast: A Problem for Distribution Studies? American Journal of Numismatics 32:169-178.