Pollen evidence of disturbed fill (Golder Borehole 103)

About This Sample

In 1970 Golder Associates, the engineering consultants hired by Triton Alliance to investigate ground conditions for a large excavation, recovered intact samples of the soil filling cavities in the bedrock near the Money Pit. Selected samples went to Professor J.C. Ritchie, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, for palynological analysis, the identification and counting of pollen grains preserved in soil. The question was whether the fill was natural or had been placed there by people.

Two samples from 215 to 218 feet in Borehole 102, fifty feet south of the Money Pit, showed the character of ancient glacial till with no trace of younger soil. Two samples from 193 to 198 feet in Borehole 103, at the Money Pit itself, were very different. Ritchie's report of 25 May 1970 found aggregations of typical post-glacial and recent pollen types alongside the rare isolated grains, such as hornbeam and elm, normal in the till, and concluded that recent or post-glacial material had been mixed secondarily into the original matrix.

Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, the geotechnical engineers who reviewed the Golder work, read the result as verification that the deep fill at the Money Pit contains surface soil carried down by people. It is one of the few laboratory tests from Oak Island aimed at the fill itself rather than at an object found in it. The test shows that the ground was disturbed, but not when: surface soil could have reached that depth with the original diggers or with any of the excavations, collapses and drilling campaigns since 1795.