Why Was Wool Buried Beneath This Boulder? (Season 13) | The Curse of Oak Island

-[Craig] Wow. -Hi.
-[Marty] How we all doing? -[laughs] We’re doing great.
[Marty] It looks like the booby trap -in the Indiana Jones movies, doesn’t it? -[laughter] [narrator] As a bright new morning begins on Oak Island, Rick and Marty Lagina and their partner Craig Tester join other members of the team on Lot 8 to continue investigating a potentially breakthrough discovery: a massive boulder that sits above a series of smaller, evenly-spaced stones that strongly suggest it is not a natural formation. There’s this trench that they’ve excavated that goes well below the bottom of the boulder, that was filled with rubble that’s all over there, and– [Marty] You dug all that out from under there?
-[Fiona] Yes. Yep. -[Jack] Wow.
This was a huge effort for somebody to do this.
We just don’t know when, why and who.
-Okay. -Yeah.
There’s actually voids underneath the rock.
We had a camera in there, and you could see spaces.
Okay.
[narrator] In recent weeks, the team has found links of a chain that could be 500 years old, as well as a potentially 700-year-old English bag seal near this feature. I’ll show you, there’s a really -good spot. -All right.
[narrator] And after feeding a snake camera into a small void that was discovered below the boulder, they’ve seen not only a possible iron spike but perhaps evidence of treasure. [Rick] Oh, my God. That looks like there’s a pearl.
[Peter] Yeah.
One of the key things here is that the trench you see, it’s a trench that was made -by somebody. -[Marty] Sure.
[Ian] So, somebody was trying to get, and probably did get, underneath the rock with excavation.
[Marty] Okay.
What about it’s a plug? It’s a plug.
It’s designed to hide something.
[Rick] I think it is covering something.
Some sort of cavity where something was placed.
Yes, something’s under there, in my opinion.
[Marty] That’s more exciting. I mean, somebody tunneling underneath it could have just been a searcher.
Somebody plugging something wasn’t a searcher.
And it really doesn’t appear to be modern.
You can see the soil stains on the bottom of those two big rocks there.
That’s an indication that these rocks have been sitting in that soil for a long period of time.
-Right. -Possibly before the Money Pit was discovered.
One thing that’s limiting us are the– are these -three boulders. -[Craig] Yeah.
[Marty] Well, then, we should at least make a road in here for a backhoe, ’cause you’re not gonna move those without one, are you?
To continue this safely, those have to go, so we can…
-[Marty] Yeah. -…have more room.
[Craig] But you’re fine with us bringing an excavator in and moving these bigger boulders out?
-Yeah, of course. -[Marty] Yeah.
Don’t let my impatience give you the wrong message, ’cause I am impatient, but this is exciting.
-This is really cool. -Yeah.
So, anyway, the sooner you guys can get back to work, the sooner we can do all of this, so get back to work.
Get busy, eh? Would you guys?
-Geez. -[laughter] Here they come.
[narrator] …Marty prepares to move several large stones away from the massive boulder to help the archaeological team dig by hand underneath it. Nice.
[Craig] Gonna go with the-the big one first?
-Yeah. -Okay.
[Marty] It’s not only tricky, I want to make sure that whatever I do, I don’t dislodge them so they roll down in the hole.
[Alex] That’s good.
[Marty] And so, I got to make sure I keep control of this situation.
[Fiona] Oh, look at that.
-[Tansy] Ooh! -Nice.
[Craig] You know, my biggest hope is that we do find something significant under the boulder. But I’m hoping at least we find some sort of artifact to tell us who was there.
[Craig] I got some more buckets to sift through.
♪ ♪ Hey, Laird.
What you think of this?
I don’t know if that has any meaning to it or not, but…
definitely has some material or something.
[Laird] Mm-hmm.
The red part looks like cloth of some sort?
-I mean, it all looks shredded, but… -Like a textile.
-[Craig] Yeah. -Yeah.
You think the whole thing is a textile of some sort, or…
[Laird] It sure looks like it.
[Craig] The red material, is that a dye?
Can we determine the type of dye, potentially?
It is a dye.
The red is definitely a dye.
-If it’s older, it’s a natural dye. -Mm-hmm.
I think we have to get that, uh, under the microscope.
It’s quite possible the XRF may be able to do that.
-Okay. -Yeah.
[Craig] I see this material and, quickly in my mind, I see somebody trying to move these boulders and it scrapes and takes a part of their shirt or jacket or whatever, and it’s just a little piece left on that larger rock.
[Laird] If we determine it’s old, now that’s pretty significant.
-Okay. -We should be able to tell if it’s a natural fiber or not.
-Okay. -Given the lack of artifacts, -I think it’s worth bagging that. -Okay.
[Craig] We know it was under one of the boulders that Marty had just removed, so it was probably 18 inches below the normal surface and below a boulder. And it may tell us who was here and when they were here, so I’m excited to see what the results are.
Even if a mouse buried this, the mouse would have gone into this rock structure -after it was made. -Correct.
-So, this is going to be younger than, uh… -Yeah.
-…than the rock structure. -Pretty cool.
-We know this had to be in place before then. -Earlier.
-And that could help date it. -Yep.
-It could be exciting. All right. -Can I bag ‘er?
Yep.
[Craig] Okay. Well, we’ll get ‘er tested. [Laird] All right. As a new morning shines bright on Oak Island What can you tell us about it?
[Emma] Yeah. So, I did do a CT scan on it, XRF, um, the whole shebang.
But the CT scan actually…
gave great imaging.
And you can kind of see the design of the knitting or the loops that go inward and then outward.
So, we’re seeing a style of weft knitting.
Mm-hmm.
[Emma] So, weft knitting is knitting by interlocking strands of loops, or rows of loops.
-Okay. -Yeah.
And whether or not it’s handmade or early machine-made, first glance from the visuals, I’m not 100% sure.
It’s kind of hard to narrow down.
-Yeah. -Yeah. As for the material used, I would like to do a simple burn test.
-Really? -Yeah. To determine what kind of material was made, because depending on how it was burnt, how it melts or kind of turns into ash, we can discern quickly what kind of material it is.
[Marty] Like, what are we looking for?
-If it’s what, it’s what? -If it’s polyester, it will– it burns really quickly, and then it kind of turns into a liquid form.
If it’s more cotton or linen, it’s more ashy of-of a burn.
Um, if it’s silk, as soon as you move it away from the fire, it snuffs the fire out.
So, it doesn’t burn, it just kind of disintegrates.
Wool should kind of clump up into like an ashy or kind of burnt texture and then you can crush it.
Okay.
So, who would like to be my assistant?
-Peter. -I will.
Okay. You are just going to light it on fire.
-Okay. -[laughs softly] -[Marty] Wow. -[Alex] That was it?
[Emma] Yeah. And then we’ll let it cool.
And then we can crush it.
And that is wool.
-Really? -Wool? -Yeah.
-[Marty] Amazing. -[Laird] That’s interesting, because not far away from where that wool was found, Katya found the bag seal…
-Wow. -Okay.
…which has a very distinctive sheepskin symbol on it, and that is associated with the city of Leeds in England, which is a major manufacturer of wool products dating back to the 1300s.
Oh.
And this makes it all the more interesting.
Yeah.
-What are the next steps? -[Emma] I think getting an expert into knitting patterns and then with dye mechanics and recipes will point towards something more accurate.
-Yeah. Well, it makes sense. Yeah. -Yeah. Yeah.
[Marty] Okay. Extremely interesting.
Maybe it’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we might find -under that boulder, right? -[chuckles] And actually, what we might find under the boulder itself -might shed a little light on that. -[Emma] Yeah.
[Rick] We’ve got to dig deeper under it, as carefully as possible, under your guidance.
Yeah. Absolutely.
[Marty] Good job as always.
Uh, enigmatic as always.
More things to do, as always.
-Let’s do them. -Mm-hmm.
-[Craig] Sounds good. Thank you. -[Peter] Thank you. [narrator] As the meeting concludes in the lab…