1781 Spanish half-real silver coin

About This Coin

A silver Spanish half-real coin dated 1781, found on Lot 5 by the previous owner Robert S. Young. Between 1996 and his death in 2020, Young marked any finds on the property with numbered pegs. During Season 12, archaeologists working at the rounded stone feature on Lot 5 dug out a Robert Young peg numbered 5-025. Laird Niven checked the database and reported that peg 5-025 corresponded to a silver 1781 Spanish half-real.

Young purchased Lot 5 from Fred Nolan, his research partner, more than twenty years before the Lagina team acquired the property. He found many artefacts there, including buttons, ancient coins, and iron tools. In 1996, Young found a coin on the lot that he believed was Norse. Dr. Edwin Barnhart later noted that Vikings were crossing the Atlantic around 1000 AD and plating objects with brass, though Young's Norse attribution has not been independently verified. The half-real, by contrast, is clearly identifiable as an eighteenth-century Spanish colonial coin.

The Spanish half-real was a common denomination in colonial trade, circulating throughout the Americas and Atlantic maritime routes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its presence on Lot 5 places it alongside other artefacts from the property, including red earthenware with unusual purple and black glaze dated to the 1600s, a decorative strap, a river raft spike identified as pre-1840, and iron hardware whose composition matched artefacts from the William Phips birthplace in Maine. The coin's 1781 date falls within the period of British colonial administration of Nova Scotia and is consistent with the broad pattern of eighteenth-century activity documented across the island.