Oak Island Treasure was created in August 2001 by Jo Atherton, a Bedfordshire-based professional artist who currently works with the Oak Island team. The site was launched at oakislandtreasure.co.uk to bring the Money Pit story to an international audience and grew over the following two decades into one of the principal independent Oak Island research websites in the English-language web, with a Facebook community of more than twenty thousand followers.
Atherton has visited Oak Island four times and has been associated with the broader Oak Island community since the early 2000s, including attendance at Explore Oak Island Days 2006. The site has been involved in third-party projects across this period, including promotional work with Buena Vista on the film National Treasure, work with Canadian MTV producers, and an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
The site relaunched in the mid-2010s under the URL oakislandarchives.com, with the original .co.uk domain continuing to operate alongside it. Holdings include digitized excavation documents from across the search history, photographs of the island and its key sites taken during Atherton's research visits, carbon-dating reports, contemporary newspaper articles, and a body of theory pieces and original research. A community forum at forum.oakislandtreasure.co.uk operates alongside the main archive and remains searchable.
The site's editorial position is engaged with the Oak Island mystery without being committed to any single theory.
What this source documents
Excavation documents drawn from across the Oak Island search history; photographs of the island, the Money Pit area, Smith's Cove, and other key sites taken during Atherton's research visits; carbon-dating reports; theory pieces covering the major hypotheses of the Money Pit's origin (pirate, Spanish, military, Templar, natural-formation); contemporary historical newspaper articles; community discussion in the forum thread archive.
Why it matters
Oak Island Treasure is one of the longest-running independent Oak Island research websites and represents the English research presence in the broader Oak Island community. Atherton's working connection to the Oak Island team, attendance at search community events since the early 2000s, and curation of a quarter-century of archive material make the site one of the principal community-led references in the Oak Island documentary record.