Silver-gilt button, 1600s-1700s (Lot 5)

About This Button

A small object initially identified in the field as a possible coin or token, recovered near the round stone feature on Lot 5 in Season 12, Episode 25 (Uplifting Discoveries) by Gary Drayton and other members of the team. Field discussion was inconclusive: Drayton observed a faint shank area but could not rule out either a coin or a button. The piece was sent to archaeometallurgist Emma Culligan for laboratory analysis.

In the season finale War Room, Culligan delivered the result. "It is a button," she told the team. The body of the button is a copper alloy with silver gilt, the silver visible throughout. The copper carries an unusual signature: a very high arsenic content. "The arsenical copper indicates the medieval times," Culligan explained. "A skilled person made it, refined the copper and created this alloy. So they are recycling medieval copper." Marty Lagina pressed her on a date, asking whether pre-1750 was reasonable. Culligan agreed, with a copper-iron alloy reading placing the surviving artefact in the 1600s or 1700s. Rick Lagina greeted the result by saying: "Medieval, baby."

The reading places the button in the post-medieval period in its surviving form, but built from copper that had already been worked and recycled from a medieval source. The find sits among the wider concentration of pre-modern material recovered from the round feature on Lot 5, including four coins from Season 11 (a Roman piece dated between 100 and 300 AD, a Roman piece dated to before 100 AD, a brass piece given competing 13th-century French and 6th to 8th-century Indian identifications, and a Tudor portcullis piece from the 1500s), an additional cut silver coin, a folded copper coin, and a Roman piece of Claudius II recovered in Season 13. The lot has no recorded history of habitation.