Purple-stained wood fragment

About This Artifact

A fragment of wood bearing a distinctive purple stain was recovered from the spoils of borehole H-8 in the Money Pit area during Season 5. The piece was small enough to have passed through the hammer grab alongside the bone, leather, and pottery fragments that formed the bulk of the H-8 artefact collection. Its colour immediately set it apart from the other wood recovered at the site.

Medieval bookbinding expert Joe Landry examined the fragment at the Dawson Printshop in Halifax and identified the purple colouring as resembling Tyrian purple, one of the most expensive dyes in the ancient and medieval world. Tyrian purple was originally extracted from the mucus of Murex sea snails and was so costly that its use was restricted to royalty, senior clergy, and the most important ecclesiastical documents. Landry suggested the staining could result from ecclesiastical leather bleeding into a book board over time, and noted that the thickness of the wood was consistent with a book cover. Taken together with the parchment and leather bookbinding recovered from the same borehole, Landry considered the purple-stained wood compelling evidence of an ancient bound volume.

In Season 6, purple-stained wood appeared again in spoils from a Money Pit borehole at approximately one hundred feet, near hand-hewn timbers and glazed pottery. The team identified it as similar to the pieces found in H-8 the previous year that Landry had connected to medieval manuscript production. The recurrence of this material in multiple boreholes at the Money Pit suggests it is not an isolated fragment but part of a dispersed deposit, consistent with the collapse and scattering of original vault contents across the underground workings.