The ‘Roman’ Sword From Oak Island, and Why Tests Say It Is Modern

In late 2015 the treasure hunter and television personality Jovan Hutton Pulitzer announced that a sword pulled from the water off Oak Island, Nova Scotia, was Roman, and that it proved Roman sailors had reached North America more than a thousand years before Columbus. The claim spread fast. It did not survive testing: in January 2016 metal analysis at Saint Mary's University in Halifax showed the sword was made of brass with about 35 percent zinc, a recipe typical of the 1890s or later. The sword is almost certainly modern, and there is still no accepted evidence that Romans ever crossed the Atlantic.

The claim in brief

Oak Island is famous for a treasure hunt that has run, on and off, since the late 1700s, and since 2014 for the History Channel series The Curse of Oak Island. Pulitzer said the sword had been recovered from the waters nearby and that his team's analysis matched it to genuine Roman artefacts. He linked it to a wider theory that a Roman ship had reached Nova Scotia around the first century AD, or even earlier.

Pulitzer framed the find as history-changing. Speaking to the Boston Standard, he described the metal as having "the same arsenic and lead signature" as another sword he regarded as Roman. He also argued that mainstream historians resist such discoveries because they would mean rewriting textbooks.

The supporting evidence Pulitzer offered

The sword was presented as one piece of a larger case. The other strands were:

Rock carvings. Pulitzer said petroglyphs in the region, which he attributed to the Mi'kmaq, the Indigenous people of Nova Scotia, showed Roman legionaries carrying swords.
Inscribed stones. He said two carved stones on Oak Island bore a script from the ancient Levant, the eastern Mediterranean coast.
DNA. He claimed the Mi'kmaq carry a rare genetic marker from the Levant.
Other objects. He pointed to a shield boss reportedly found in Nova Scotia in the 1800s, a "legionnaire's whistle" said to have come from Oak Island in 1901, gold coins described as Roman or Carthaginian, and a bearded terracotta head unearthed near Mexico City in 1933.
A plant. He noted that European barberry, Berberis vulgaris, grows on the island, and suggested ancient sailors had brought it as a food and scurvy remedy.

This photograph shows one of the incised rock images that Pulitzer's group read as a line of soldiers with weapons. Rock art of this kind is notoriously open to interpretation, and the identification as Roman legionaries came from the treasure-hunting team, not from archaeologists or Mi'kmaq knowledge-keepers.

A round bronze-coloured shield boss, the domed centre piece that protected the hand on a shield, presented as Roman evidence. No published archaeological record documents where and in what layer it was found, which is the information needed to date it.

A small coin displayed in a collector's holder, offered as one of the gold "Roman Carthage" coins from the mainland near Oak Island. Its find context, like that of the shield boss, has not been documented in any scholarly publication.

What the tests found

The decisive test was filmed for The Curse of Oak Island. The brothers Rick and Marty Lagina, who lead the show's search, had the sword examined at Saint Mary's University by a classics specialist and a chemist who works on metals. Their verdict, broadcast in January 2016 in the episode "Sword Play," was that the blade is brass containing roughly 35 percent zinc. Brass that rich in zinc is characteristic of industrial production from the 1890s onwards; ancient brass contained much less. The sword, they concluded, was almost certainly modern.

Pulitzer had earlier called the sword a "100% confirmed" Roman artefact. After the broadcast he dropped the "100% confirmed" and "tested" language and argued that other swords should be used as the benchmark instead.

A second clue came from California. Another sword of the same design, known as the "California sword," turned out to have been cast from the same mould but to be far less worn, so its details are crisp. The anthropologist Andy White, who made 3D scans of it, showed that features read on the Oak Island sword as a seashell and rocks are in fact a classical palmette ornament and probably a pair of lions beneath a figure of Hercules. Similar Hercules-hilted swords in copper alloy and iron have since surfaced, suggesting a batch of decorative copies, perhaps souvenirs, made in the fairly recent past.

Why the rest of the case falls short

Each of the other strands has a simpler explanation.

The DNA claim. No published genetic study has shown a Levantine marker among the Mi'kmaq. Indigenous peoples of the Americas descend overwhelmingly from populations that crossed from Asia, and the rare lineages occasionally cited in such theories have been traced to those ancient migrations, not to the Mediterranean.

The coins and objects. Roman coins have turned up in the Americas several times, but the anthropologist Jeremiah Epstein, who reviewed such finds, rejected them as evidence of contact because they lacked secure archaeological context, were poorly documented or were forgeries. Coins also travelled in later centuries as collectors' items and in ships' ballast. The terracotta head from Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca in Mexico is the most debated case; it came from a burial offering dated to about 1476 to 1510, and specialists remain divided on whether it is Roman at all, with an unconfirmed claim that it was planted as a prank.

The barberry. European barberry was widely planted by colonists in North America from the 17th century, for hedges, jam and dye, and later spread on its own. Its presence on Oak Island says nothing about ancient visitors.

The inscribed stones and carvings. Interpretations of these features have come from the treasure-hunting community. None has been published or accepted by specialists in ancient scripts or in Mi'kmaq rock art.

Who really reached the Americas before Columbus

The question behind the story is a fair one, and the real answer is interesting. The first people to reach the Americas arrived from Asia many thousands of years ago, and their descendants built the societies Columbus met in 1492.

Among later arrivals from across the ocean, the Norse are the best documented. At L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, explored by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad in the 1960s and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a 2021 study of tree rings in wood cut with metal tools dated Norse activity to the year 1021, the only secure calendar date for Europeans across the Atlantic before Columbus.

In the Pacific, the sweet potato offers strong evidence that Polynesian voyagers and South Americans met: the plant, native to South America, was growing in the Cook Islands by about 1000 AD. For Romans, by contrast, there is no shipwreck, no settlement and no securely dated artefact on American soil.

How to read "history rewritten" headlines

Stories like this one follow a pattern, and a few questions help sort the solid from the shaky:

Has an independent lab tested it? The Oak Island claim collapsed as soon as one did.
Is the find context recorded? An object without a documented location and layer can be dated only by its style, which is easy to fake or misread.
Has it been published for specialists to check? Press releases and television episodes are not peer review.
Do the people making the claim sell something? Books, shows and tours are not proof of bad faith, but they are a reason to look for independent confirmation.

The Oak Island sword is still a good story. It is simply a story about late-19th or 20th-century decorative metalwork and modern treasure hunting, not about Roman sailors in Nova Scotia.

Sources: Jason Colavito, 20 January 2016: Oak Island gives verdict on Roman sword; Andy White Anthropology, 12 January 2016: 3D scans of the California sword; Wikipedia: Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories; Wikipedia: L'Anse aux Meadows. Images: Investigatinghistory.org. First shared on this site from The Mind Unleashed.

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