Lead cross

About This Artifact

A heavy lead cross was recovered from the intertidal zone at Smith's Cove by Gary Drayton during Season 5. Working the rock pools between the beach and the old cofferdams at low tide, Gary got a strong signal at ten inches depth and pulled the cross from the ground. It featured crude, asymmetrical construction and a square hole at the top where a nail or cord would have been threaded for wearing. Gary immediately identified the form as medieval, estimating a date range of 1200 to 1600, and told Rick Lagina he had seen the same shape carved into a wall at the Templar prison in Domme, France, which members of the team had visited just weeks earlier during a research trip.

Archaeologist Laird Niven confirmed the object was lead, pierced by a square nail, crudely made, and unlike anything he had previously encountered in Nova Scotia. He noted the metal showed little wear or white patina, suggesting it had been recently unearthed rather than long exposed to the elements, and agreed with Marty Lagina's theory that the team's excavation of the French drain area the previous year may have dislodged it from its original deposit.

Dr. Chris McFarlane of the University of New Brunswick conducted laser ablation analysis, vaporising a microscopic sample and feeding it into a mass spectrometer. The results revealed trace silver in the lead consistent with old-fashioned smelting, and isotope ratios that did not match any deposit in North America. The cross was definitively crafted from European lead. Geochemist Tobias Skowronek of the German Mining Museum in Bochum then compared the isotope data against his extensive database of ore bodies. He reported that the lead was inconsistent with European quarries exploited from the fifteenth century onward and instead matched medieval mining deposits in the Montagne Noire mountain range of southern France, within roughly twenty miles of Rennes-le-Chateau, a village with strong Knights Templar connections dating to the thirteenth century.

Skowronek's analysis placed the lead as pre-fifteenth century, from a deposit too small for industrial-scale exploitation. The finding was later reinforced when he tested a separate lead artefact from Lot 21, a piece with scalloped edges found against one of the large logs in the bump-out area at Smith's Cove. The isotope data was identical to the cross, confirming both pieces came from the same ore deposit mined over six hundred years ago in southern France. Gary Drayton called the cross one of the most historic finds ever made in North America if it was deposited near the time it was manufactured.

During the team's research trip to France in Season 5, the Domme prison where at least seventy Knights Templar were held after their arrest on Friday, October 13, 1307, yielded carvings that Templar expert Jerry Glover identified as matching the cross almost exactly: crosses with four pellets in their quadrants, carved into the stone walls by prisoners using their teeth and fingernails. The cross remains the single artefact most frequently cited in arguments connecting the Knights Templar to Oak Island, and its isotope signature has not been disputed by any subsequent analysis.