Wood from 2A shaft

About This Artifact

Wood recovered from the bottom of Shaft 2A, a previously undocumented searcher shaft uncovered during the Season 12 premiere when Billy Gerhardt's excavator exposed it 17 feet from the expected location of the 1805 Onslow Company Shaft 2. Construction closely resembled Shaft 2, with a wall measurement of 116 inches, but the shaft had been deliberately packed with fill in a manner Marty Lagina read as concealment. Darker boards emerging at the bottom suggested wood that might predate the 1805 build, raising the possibility that 2A reused timber from an earlier phase of activity. The samples took on new significance in the Season 13 finale, when Dr. Ian Spooner presented results from a wood-as-filter testing program proposed by Dr. Fred Michel. The methodology rests on the principle that submerged wood acts as a passive concentrator of dissolved metals, drawing precious metals from groundwater and accumulating them within its fibers at measurable levels. Of the fifteen samples processed across the Money Pit shafts, the Shaft 2A wood returned the highest silver reading and the third-highest gold reading recorded anywhere on the island. The team reads the result as evidence that Shaft 2A sits close to a substantial concentration of precious metal, consistent with its location near the original Money Pit and within the same broader zone that has produced the season's strongest silver signals from soil sampling and groundwater analysis. The samples are held for carbon-14 and dendrochronological dating to test whether the lower boards predate the Onslow construction, which would lend support to the working theory that Shaft 2A was deliberately concealed by an earlier party operating on the island.