About This Artifact
A small rectangular arsenical-bronze object recovered by Gary Drayton on Lot 7 during Season 10, with Jack Begley present. Drayton first took it for a coin, though its sheared edges were unusual. At the Interpretive Centre, Emma Culligan scanned it with the Skyscan 1273 CT scanner and an XRF spectrometer and found it was mainly copper with high tin and arsenic content, an arsenical bronze no longer produced after the 16th century because the arsenic released dangerous gas during forging. Archaeologist Laird Niven noted the edges were not those of a struck coin. Numismatist Sandy Campbell judged it a barter piece rather than a coin and put it at least five hundred years old. In Rome, numismatist Umberto Moruzzi weighed the piece at just over four grams and estimated it at roughly a thousand years old; he observed that the weight matched a gold Byzantine coin bearing the image of Christ, which would make the object a monetary weight used to check that such coins had not been clipped or debased.
Historical Context
Rick Lagina & Doug Crowell
Where It Was Found
Found at Lot 7 — Oak Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.
