Marty Lagina and Craig Tester arrive at the Money Pit to watch Charles Barkhouse descend into the Garden Shaft, where Dumas Contracting has spent five months reconstructing the structure to a depth of 82 feet. At the bottom, Rodney MacIver points out the last original timber and a corner that has been sinking. Above ground, Marty, Craig, and Roger Fortin discuss the probing still needed. A few days later Marty himself descends the ladder, removes a couple of planks to examine the ground below, and tells the team he is certain a tunnel lies beneath the shaft.
On Lot 5, archaeologist Laird Niven tells Jack Begley that what the team initially took for the exterior of the circular stone feature is actually encircled by an additional ring of stones. Artifacts recovered from around the pit date to the mid 1750s, but Laird hopes the material inside will prove older. When Marty arrives, Laird explains the jumble of rocks was deliberately placed, and the speculation is that the pit was once filled and someone later removed stones to create the surrounding ring. Craig, Laird, Charles, and Dr. Ian Spooner visit the feature for a closer look. Spooner notes that circular stone constructions of this kind are rare; the examples he has encountered are typically fortifications such as Scottish castles or bases for rotating cannon.
In the swamp, Craig, Billy Gerhardt, Gary Drayton, and Steve Guptill continue searching for the large metallic object identified by a recent magnetometer survey. As Billy removes water from the excavation, what appears to be another section of the paved area emerges. The rocks resemble those found previously in the paved feature dated to the 1200s. The following morning Dr. Spooner arrives to inspect the stones and observes that a glacial deposit would continue uniformly, whereas this feature has clear boundaries where it stops. He confirms a human influence and describes the paved area as a staging area.
In Rome, Rick Lagina, Doug Crowell, Alex Lagina, Peter Fornetti, and Corjan Mol meet with numismatist Umberto Moruzzi, who specializes in Roman and Greek coins. Moruzzi examines the half coin found earlier in the season on Lot 5 and confirms it is Roman, from the 4th century A.D. He then turns to the metal artifact from Lot 7 and identifies it as ancient bronze, probably a thousand years old, weighing just over 4 grams. Emiliano Sacchetti translates as Moruzzi explains the piece matches the weight of a golden Byzantine coin bearing the image of Christ, suggesting it could be a monetary weight for that denomination. The next day the team visits Professor Andrea di Robilant at the American University of Rome. The professor, an author and lecturer with more than 40 years of experience studying pre-15th-century Atlantic voyages, describes a booklet published in Venice in 1558 about Venetian sailors Nicolò and Antonio Zeno. In the 1390s the brothers sailed to the Faroe Islands, where they entered the service of Lord Henry Sinclair and spent the next decade exploring the North Atlantic. The professor presents documents indicating the brothers sailed to the New World with Sinclair and shows a late-17th-century map inscribed "Discovered by Antonio Zeno in 1390."
The group then travels 65 miles northwest to Viterbo, a city founded in the 8th century that once served as temporary headquarters for Pope Alexander IV. Templar investigator Gianluca Di Prosper, who has spent more than two decades researching medieval activity in the region, leads them into the church of Santa Maria Nuova, built in 1080. Peter spots a symbol matching one found on the HO stone, and Gianluca explains that four-dot crosses mark special places associated with the Templars, the Holy Grail, or the Holy Shroud. Continuing through the church, Alex finds the Latin letters HIC carved on a pillar, which Emiliano translates as "here." Nearby the group also notices a letter A that Gianluca says refers to a compass, and a square that would be more of a Masonic symbol but should not be present given the church's age. Alex photographs the carving and demonstrates how, with a few pen strokes, the I can become a cross with four dots and the C a circle with a dot in the center, recreating the symbols on the HO stone. The resulting message, Alex proposes, reads "Here Templar Gold." Doug notes that in medieval times people "really liked their cyphers."
