Crossbow bolt (Wroclawski/Dunfield)

About This Artifact

A hand-forged iron crossbow bolt recovered from Oak Island by Robert Dunfield during his excavation in the 1960s. The artifact's exact find location was never recorded. It passed to Oak Island researcher Paul Wroclawski, who had established a relationship with Dan Blankenship in the 1990s and spent years researching the island's earliest inhabitants. After Paul's death in 2014, his son Eric preserved the piece.

Eric Wroclawski met Rick Lagina and Doug Crowell in Halifax and presented the bolt. Doug identified it as one of three crossbow bolts found on the island over the years, noting the other two had been lost. The crossbow was documented as early as 500 B.C. but revolutionized warfare 1,500 years later in Europe and the Holy Land during the Crusades. Doug's first reaction on seeing the artifact in person was that it was much smaller than he had expected from photographs.

The team brought the artifact to Denmark, where Ladby Viking Museum curator Ane Jepsen Nyborg examined it alongside a replica from her collection. She confirmed the bolt matches pieces from local archaeological digs and dated it to the early medieval period through the Viking Age, pre-1300s. The Oak Island Compendium had previously argued the artifact was a peavey pike, a removable point from a logging tool common on the island, but Doug's observation that the piece was smaller than expected may have undermined that identification.