The 7 Artifacts Season 13 Still Hasn’t Explained – And Why They Matter

They found it. Buried under feet of clay and  centuries of silence, a single piece of lead has turned the investigation upside down. Season  thirteen was supposed to be about the Money Pit, but the swamp just stole the show. We are  talking about seven artifacts that prove a pre-Columbian presence so advanced  it challenges everything we know about the New World. From high-tech metallurgy  to religious icons carried by fugitives, the evidence is undeniable. But the crazy part is  the connection between a heart-shaped stone and a secret order that vanished in thirteen  zero seven. The truth is terrifying.
Lot Five’s Dark Secret For over two centuries, the search on Oak Island focused on the seventeen hundreds pirates or  sixteen hundreds British military. It made sense.
It fit the books. But Season thirteen just took  a sledgehammer to that entire narrative. The crew moved operations to Lot Five, a seemingly random  plot of land near the shoreline, and what they found there is effectively a glitch in the matrix. They pulled up massive, waterlogged oak timbers.
At first glance, it just looks like old  wood. But here’s the catch. When they ran the dendrochronology—that’s the science of dating tree  rings—the results came back with a date range in the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds. Let that sink in for a second.
This isn’t a campfire log. This is a massive,  engineered foundation embedded deep in the earth.
The joinery style doesn’t match anything used  by later British or French settlers. It’s heavy, medieval construction. This means that a hundred  years before Columbus even thought about getting on a boat, someone was on Oak Island building  a massive structure. And they weren’t just visiting; they were building to stay. This timber changes the entire scope of the mystery. It suggests that the “Money  Pit” might not be a vault dug in panic, but part of a permanent settlement established  during the Middle Ages. But it gets weirder.
While the team was still reeling from the  timber dates, the metal detector hit a signal that shouldn’t exist. Buried in the same soil  layers of Lot Five was a coin. Now, we have seen coins on this island before—Spanish Maravedis,  British pennies. But this one was different.
It was a Roman bronze coin. Numismatists—the coin experts—looked at the faded imperial motifs and placed it somewhere  between four hundred and five hundred AD. This is the definition of an impossible artifact. A Roman  coin, potentially one thousand six hundred years old, sitting in Nova Scotia. Skeptics will  say it was a trade good, maybe dropped by a later collector. It’s not that simple, though. The depth of the find matters. It wasn’t on the surface. It was deep in the undisturbed  soil context. If this coin is legitimate, and early analysis suggests it is, it  supports the wildest theory of them all: transatlantic contact thousands of years before  recorded history. It suggests the island has been a waypoint for ancient mariners  long before the Templars or the pirates.
Basically, Lot Five has proven that the island  wasn’t just a bank vault for a one-time deposit.
It was a hub. A busy, active location visited  by different cultures over millennia. The timber proves habitation in the fourteen hundreds. The  coin hints at visitors from the ancient world.
The show hasn’t fully connected the dots yet,  leaving fans screaming at their TVs. They are treating these as isolated finds. But when  you put them together, a picture forms of a location that was known to the elites of the  ancient world. It was a secret destination.
And that brings us to the most disturbing  question. If people have been coming here for one thousand six hundred years, what  were they bringing? Or more importantly, what were they guarding? The answer might not be  gold. It might be something that required heavy industry to protect. The timeline is broken, but  the swamp is hiding something much more dangerous.
The Man-Made Defense Everyone is obsessed with the Money Pit, but the Swamp is where the real story is  hiding. For years, the team has suspected the swamp is man-made, an artificial cover  for something massive. Season thirteen has finally produced the smoking gun that proves this  area wasn’t just a bog—it was a defensive line.
In Episode five, amidst the mud and sludge,  Gary Drayton unearthed a fragment of iron that looked like nothing more than scrap. But  X-ray analysis revealed a complex internal structure. This wasn’t a nail or a hinge.  It was a fragment of a firearm mechanism.
Specifically, it looks like part of a  matchlock or even a wheellock system.
Here is the deal. The corrosion patterns and the  style of the iron casting date this piece back over eight hundred years. We are talking about  the very dawn of portable firearms in Europe.
Finding a gun part from the seventeen  hundreds is expected. Finding a firearm component that could be from the twelve  hundreds or thirteen hundreds is insanity.
This implies an armed force.  You don’t bring experimental, high-tech weaponry—for the time—to a deserted  island unless you are expecting a fight. This tiny piece of rusted iron changes the narrative  from “treasure burial” to “military operation.” It suggests that whoever was here had access to  the cutting edge of medieval warfare technology.
And that’s putting it lightly. If there were armed guards, what were they protecting? The answer came in  the form of a small, innocent-looking disc.
In the season premiere, they found a  scalloped-edge disc made of lead or tin.
It was buried mixed in with coconut fiber. Now,  coconut fiber is the classic Oak Island marker—it was used as packing material for cargo on long  voyages. But the disc itself is the puzzle.
It has notched borders and no clear inscription.  Drayton called it a “shipping seal.” In the ancient world, shipping seals were used to  lock bags of currency or documents. If the seal was broken, you knew the contents were  compromised. Finding an intact or discarded seal in the swamp suggests that cargo was  being offloaded and processed right there.
The design is ominous. The scalloped edges  mimic the “seven lives must be lost” lore, although that might just be a creepy coincidence.  But functionally, this disc links the swamp to high-value transport. You don’t seal  bags of grain with lead. You seal gold, silver, or documents of extreme importance. So, here is the picture Season thirteen is painting: You have a man-made swamp reinforced  with stones. You have shipping seals indicating valuable cargo was moved through this  specific zone. And you have ancient firearm parts suggesting that this cargo was  guarded by soldiers with top-tier weaponry.
The show hasn’t explained why a firearm from  the Middle Ages is sitting in a Canadian swamp. They glossed over it to focus on the  drilling. But this is the key. It proves that the “depositors” were not a ragtag group  of pirates burying a chest. They were a military organization. They had discipline,  they had technology, and they had a mission.
The swamp wasn’t a dumping ground. It  was a loading dock for something that the world wasn’t supposed to see. And based  on the corrosion, this operation happened centuries before the Money Pit was discovered. But a military operation needs supplies. It needs tools. And most importantly, it needs a way to  fix things when they break. The evidence found on the shoreline proves that this island  wasn’t just a storage facility. They were forging something in the fire. The Sacred Lead Cross If you think the firearm was shocking, wait  until you see what was happening on the beach.
In Episode two, the team dug up oxidized iron and  copper shards. To the untrained eye, it looks like industrial waste. But the XRF scans—technology  that breaks down the elemental composition of metal—revealed a rare alloy mix of tin and lead. This isn’t standard colonial trash.
This is evidence of metallurgy. The crazy part is the location.
These fragments were found in layers suggesting  a makeshift forge. This means the people on Oak Island weren’t just dropping things; they  were making things. They were smelting metal.
Why does this matter? Because of the “Templar  Forge” hypothesis. Historical records show that the Knights Templar were masters of banking  and engineering, but also of metallurgy. They needed to repair armor and weapons on the fly.  Finding slag and rare alloys suggests a long-term encampment where they were actively working metal. And then, the island gave up its heart. Literally.
In Episode four, they found a ten-pound  granite stone shaped distinctly like a heart. On the surface, it bears a faint,  worn carving of a cross. Carbon dating of organic material found directly under  the stone points to the twelve hundreds.
This is where the “Wow  factor” goes off the charts.
A heart-shaped stone with a cross isn’t a tool.  It’s a marker. It’s a religious artifact. In medieval symbolism, the heart represented charity  and faith, core tenets of the monastic orders.
The carving style matches the graffiti  found in the Domme prison in France, where Templars were held captive. The show left this open-ended, asking if it was erosion. But nature doesn’t carve  perfect crosses into granite hearts. This stone was placed there. It feels like a memorial, or  perhaps a boundary marker for consecrated ground.
If this island was a vault for religious  artifacts, like the Holy Grail or the Ark, you would expect to find religious markers. And finally, the pièce de résistance: The Lead Cross Variant. We all know the famous lead cross found years ago. But Season thirteen found another one,  or at least a seal that mimics the iconography.
It’s a scalloped lead seal with partial religious  symbols. It’s not a duplicate; it’s a variation.
This matters because it implies a system. One  cross could be a fluke—a soldier dropping his necklace. Two distinct lead artifacts with  similar religious vibes? That’s a pattern.
It reinforces the idea that the people here were  not just soldiers or sailors; they were pilgrims.
The symbols on this new lead piece are unresolved.  They look like a code. Some researchers believe these lead crosses were actually maps, disguised  as religious badges. If you overlay them on the island, they point to specific features. The show is dripping this information slowly, but the conclusion is staring us in the face. You  have a forge to work metal. You have religious icons dating to the exact time the Templars fled  Europe. You have a defensive line in the swamp.
This wasn’t a pit stop. This was a  relocation. The seven artifacts of Season thirteen prove that a group of people  moved their entire culture, their technology, and their most sacred treasures to this remote  island. They built a fortress underground and sealed it with a curse. The artifacts are  pieces of a map, and they all point to one date.
The Big Picture So, what do these seven artifacts actually tell us? It is time to look at the aggregate  data without the filter of convenient folklore.
When you step back and rigorously analyze the  Medieval Timber, the Roman Coin, the Firearm, the Disc, the Slag, the Heart Stone, and the Lead  Cross, the pirate theory is dead. Hands down.
The romanticized idea of a rogue captain burying  a chest of stolen loot simply cannot survive this evidence. Pirates operate on speed, mobility, and  temporary concealment. Pirates do not transport heavy medieval timbers to construct complex,  deep-earth foundations in the fourteen hundreds.
Pirates do not carry ancient Roman coins as  valid currency. Pirates certainly do not take the time to carve precise, religious hearts into  immovable granite boulders as territorial markers.
The logistics required for what we are seeing on  Oak Island contradict the very nature of piracy.
Season thirteen has finally provided the physical  proof of a multi-generational, industrial-scale operation. The presence of the Roman coin suggests  that this island was known long before the Age of Sail—a secret location known in antiquity and  likely passed down through secret societies as a safe haven. It implies a lineage of knowledge,  a map shared only among the initiated elite.
Then, consider the medieval timbers and the  specific firearm parts. These artifacts indicate a massive mobilization of resources during  the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This was not a weekend dig; this was a military-grade  excavation supported by a supply chain that likely stretched back to Europe. The lead cross, with its  specific metallurgy, acts as a signature, pointing directly toward the Knights Templar or a similar  order with the financing to move mountains.
The “Curse” of Oak Island isn’t magic, and it  isn’t a ghost story. It’s engineering. It is a highly sophisticated defensive system built by  people who possessed the wealth of kingdoms and a desperate need to disappear. The slag found on the  island suggests on-site metallurgy and forging, meaning they weren’t just hiding things; they  were building things. These artifacts are the debris left behind by a civilization that went  underground to protect something of immense value.
The experts on the show remain cautious,  often hedging their bets to maintain scientific rigor. They have to be. But for  those of us looking at the raw patterns, the data speaks for itself. We are currently  missing a single key detail—a “master key”—that definitively links the Romans to the Templars  and finally to the island’s geography. But one thing is absolutely certain: whatever is waiting  in the Money Pit is worth far more than gold or jewels. It is a timeline-shattering  revelation. It is history itself.
Do you think the Roman coin proves the timeline  is wrong, or was it just a lucky drop? These artifacts are changing everything we know. If  you want to see more breakdowns of the history they don’t teach you in school, smash that  like button and subscribe. See you next time.