About This Artifact
The iron pin came out of a 15-by-15-foot test pit beside the round stone foundation on Lot 5, where archaeologist Helen Sheldon and her crew were working through the soil around the feature. At first it looked like an ordinary nail. Its square shank showed it had been forged by hand, and a magnet confirmed it was iron, yet it had barely corroded: Sheldon remarked that it was almost as well preserved as copper, a rare state for buried iron. A second old nail from the same pit was set aside for comparison, and both went to the lab. There, metallurgist Emma Culligan ran XRF and CT scans and identified the piece as a hand-wrought iron pin rather than a common nail.
The metal proved unusually clean, free of the impurities that speed corrosion, which explains its condition. Its aluminum-to-silicon ratio matched the signature of colonial American iron, and Culligan dated it to the late 1600s to mid-1700s. That window overlaps the period that engineers Graham Harris and Les MacPhie proposed for the Money Pit's construction, the voyage of Sir William Phips and the crew of the Good Luck in 1688, and Marty Lagina asked Culligan to compare the pin's metallurgy with metal from the Phips collection. The result of that comparison has not been reported.
Whatever its link to Phips, the pin adds a dated, hand-made iron fastener to the round feature on Lot 5, one of several finds from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries recovered around the stone foundations there.
Historical Context
The Curse of Oak Island Season 12 Episode 17
Where It Was Found
Found at Lot 5. Location: Oak Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.
