Copper Nameplate

About This Artifact

A small copper piece bearing rivets, recovered by Peter Fornetti and metal detection expert Gary Drayton on Lot 4 while sifting through ten tons of soil that had been removed from the rounded stone foundation on Lot 5. The find surfaced during a wash-plant session featured in The Curse of Oak Island Season 12 Episode 11, aired 4 February 2024.

In the field, Drayton noted that the rivets suggested the piece had once been fastened to a textile or leather object, perhaps from a uniform, bag, or satchel, and hoped lab analysis might reveal a military insignia or regimental marking. Blacksmithing expert Carmen Legge examined the artifact at the Oak Island Research Center and identified it as a nameplate, the type of small applied panel used historically to mark personal effects, equipment, or container fittings.

Archaeometallurgist Emma Culligan ran an XRF scan and returned a copper alloy composed of copper, zinc, iron, lead, and arsenic. The arsenic content placed the manufacture before the industrial period, since smelting practices prior to the mid-eighteenth century routinely left residual arsenic in copper alloys while later refining methods removed it. Culligan placed the most likely date in the late seventeenth century.

The rounded stone foundation on Lot 5, a deliberately buried structure under investigation since Season 11, has produced artifacts spanning the medieval period through the late eighteenth century, including six Roman coins, multiple Venetian trade beads, a 14th-century lead barter token scientifically matched to the lead cross from Smith's Cove, simulated French gemstones, military-style buttons, and a fragment of a cast-iron cooking pot of European origin. The copper nameplate adds to the colonial-era component of the assemblage.