Wooden Stakes

About This Artifact

Wooden survey stakes have been recovered from multiple locations across the Oak Island swamp since Fred Nolan first drained the bog in 1969. Nolan, a professional land surveyor, believed the stakes had been placed by whoever originally constructed the swamp as an artificial feature, and that they marked out its layout in the same way a modern surveyor would peg a site before breaking ground. Subsequent excavations by the Lagina team have produced stakes from the southeastern swamp near the cobblestone path, from the northern swamp in the vicinity of the brick-and-slate vault, and from the western swamp where a second cobblestone feature was identified in Season 13.

The stakes are hand-cut wooden points, sharpened by axe blows that produce a series of flat facets converging to a tip. Early recoveries, including those described by Billy Gerhardt in Season 7, show six distinct cuts. From Season 13 onward the show began referring to the stakes as eight-sided or octagonal, though the physical evidence suggests irregular faceted shaping rather than a precision geometric cross-section. Different cut patterns have been noted on stakes recovered from the same area, which the team has interpreted as the work of more than one person. Confirmed spacing between stakes along the cobblestone path measured 14 feet, and stakes across multiple locations were found at a consistent elevation of roughly one and a half feet above sea level.

Every stake subjected to radiocarbon analysis has returned a date in the 17th century. Ian Spooner's assessments of stakes along the southeastern cobblestone path placed them in the 17th century, and the Season 12 synthesis of swamp findings dated the cobblestone path stakes to between 1650 and 1700. Fred Nolan's original 1969 dating put his stakes at up to 300 years before the 1795 discovery of the Money Pit, giving an outer limit of approximately 1495, though subsequent testing has not confirmed pre-17th-century dates for any recovered specimen. No stake examined to date has returned a carbon date predating 1600.

In Season 13, Episode 16, Professor Adriano Gaspani applied archaeoastronomical analysis to the GPS positions recorded by surveyor Steve Guptill for each recovered stake. Gaspani found that the stakes divide into two groups, both sharing stellar alignments with Deneb, the primary star in the Cygnus constellation, at an epoch consistent with a 13th-century construction date. This is the same methodology and the same star system he used to date Nolan's Cross to approximately 1217 AD. His conclusion was that the stake positions reflect a master plan originating in the medieval period, and that the stakes and the cross were set out by the same people as part of a single coordinated layout. The physical alignment of the recovered stakes to Gaspani's projected line is approximate rather than precise, and the analysis rests on positional data rather than on the physical age of the wood.

The stakes present a genuine interpretive difficulty. The radiocarbon evidence places the wood firmly in the colonial period, consistent with the other 17th-century datings from the swamp complex, including the cobblestone path, the Eye of the Swamp, and the brick-and-slate vault. Gaspani's analysis raises the possibility that 17th-century builders were following or reinstating a much older plan, replacing deteriorated medieval stakes with new ones on the same positions. That interpretation cannot be confirmed from the physical evidence alone. What the stakes establish without dispute is organised, deliberate construction activity in the swamp during the 1600s, by people working to a surveyed layout rather than at random.