I'm tired out after just reading your fake synopsis... Besides, I know nobody has found anything. From National Geographic or Popular Mechanics or common sense or something....
[QUOTE="ridernyc, post: 9946021, The idea that someone somehow dug to a depth that modern equipment can not 300 years ago is laughable.[/QUOTE] Except that pieces of parchment paper and bits of gold chain were recovered from the hole that you say couldn't have been dug.
Its almost like apiece of performance art. Like a multi-year version of the Monty Python sketch "cheese shop". There isn't any cheese in the shop and there isn't any treasure on Oak Island.
Except that pieces of parchment paper and bits of gold chain were recovered from the hole that you say couldn't have been dug.[/QUOTE] The parchment was "found" in the late 1800's so no proper documentation as to whether it's true or not.
So much of the historical evidence is anecdotal only. It's truly a wonder how much money has been spent trying to find what amounts to a story. They should focus their efforts of finding the actual hidden treasure from The Secret: A Treasure Hunt. Now that is a show I would watch (for maybe 1 or 2 seasons).
Sometimes the chase is better than the catch. I enjoy seeing the big equipment being employed and digging through the spoils, etc. The treasure would just be a bonus.
[QUOTE="numer9, post: 28948563, member: The parchment was "found" in the late 1800's so no proper documentation as to whether it's true or not.[/QUOTE] What would you call proper documentation exactly.? And what about the pictures of the wood and metal items the camera sent back when they lowered it down the hole?
It's a shame the Channel is what it is - a show about discovering archaeology that might change people's impressions of the continent's colonial history would be fine with me - but then there'd only be a couple of episodes a year and they wouldn't be able to drag it out with fake suspense and cut aways to Billy Gerhardt. Is it because people don't have the appetite for real history on television or because they've been bombarded with this kind of sensationalistc crap that this is what they expect or because the show has to compete with crap about alien Nazis?
Living my whole life less than an hour away, the island has always fascinated me. I enjoy the historic aspect of the show. I do have a problem with some of the dates however. Pieces of wood. I could chop down a 100 year old tree tomorrow and build a table with it. That doesn't date my table to the early 20th century. The brooch. Many families hang onto family heirlooms for many generations. If I found a 200 year old ring, chances are that it wasn't sitting there for 200 years but was lost at some point in the past 200 years, maybe even recently. A 500 year old ring may have been lost only 200 years ago. Tools. In the days when there weren't hardware stores everywhere, I suspect craftsmen hung onto valued tools, even passing them down to children or grandchildren. So once again, if a broken tool is dated in the 1700s, that's not an indication of when the tool broke and was discarded.
They're giving us shows to watch about nothing. Oak Island is a brilliant example. It's like zero-calorie food-stuff. The flickering lure of the television set keeps are brains from dwelling on the real stuff. As if we don't get enough of reality that we must resort to somebody else's reality on TV. I love where this concept is going.
Every time I watched an episode, I always had the same recurring thought: without the use of highly sophisticated equipment at their disposal, how were all of these “pirates” able to excavate and bury all of this alleged “booty”? None to worry, I’ve figured out the answer.
When I was a kid I thought the Oak island story was pretty interesting. So when this show started many years ago , I thought , great. It only took one or two episodes to disabuse me of that thought. I'm amazed that anyone finds the show interesting especially after all these years.
What would you call proper documentation exactly.? Carbon dating, etc. Very well could have been faked to attract investors. And what about the pictures of the wood and metal items the camera sent back when they lowered it down the hole?[/QUOTE] Quite possibly from a previous dig.
Yes, I always had a problem with the dating of the wood. My great grandfather was a stone mason and carpenter and I still have some of his tools from the turn of the century. Good tools were expensive and kept. I agree with you about the jewelry too. They found the cross that dated back to the Knights Templar and the iron was from a location in France. Very interesting find but it doesn't mean it was dropped on the island at the time when the knights were active. For some reason I end up streaming it every week. At least I can watch it commercial free.
I feel all the treasure stripped away buy the people who built the treasure pit ... long ago.. How waste money and dumb idea..
Can anyone fill me in on the current working theory about the treasure? As a kid, I found an old copy of Reader's Digest and read the original article that sparked interest in Oak Island. I gave up on this show during the first season. Tonight, I was channel surfing and caught a couple of minutes of it. They were discussing Vikings with a few comments about the Knights Templar thrown in for good measure. (?!) I always thought that the prevalent theory was Blackbeard or Captain Kidd (or some other pirate) buried a treasure chest there. P.S. Here's the 1965 Reader's Digest article. Is Oak Island Cursed?
Yeah, but it fits perfectly (and maybe is better than) that whole genere that hoodwinks the audience into thinking they're seeing something real - Aztec aliens; Nazi supernatural; idiots running around the woods howling and exceprcting an answer from bigfoot. We are what we eat or we are what we watch? It's probably clear by now that real history doesn't have an appeal to some people because it conflicts with how they see modern life.
I don't know why I'm not supposed to simply enjoy the show without expecting a treasure to turn up. I know that's the initial hook, but why must that be the entire point? I just want to find out what Europeans were doing there building extensive stone roads that ended up under a swamp and when they did it. I'm guessing it was the French or British military, but either way it's a previously undocumented part of history that deserves to be uncovered. There's an interesting story there without any treasure being found.
This is why I still watch; it's just a shame it's presented in such a dumbed down way to compete with other really stupid shows and appeal to people who think the only way Aztecs and Egyptians could build stone temples and pyramids was due to alien interference*. There may not be Sir Francis Bacon's early Shakespeare attempts, Aztec gold or the arc of the covenant covered in the dirty fingerprints of the inevitable Templars, bur something of historical intetest was going on there. It's sort of a sensationalistic Time Team that for, commercial reasons, I guess, feels the need to namecheck all the particpants seven times a show. * This reminds me of the mounds in Eastern North America and 19th century thinking that posited the Indians were too dumb to be able to construct anything like them so 'someone else' had to have been there first... Riiiiiiiiiggggggggggghhhhhhhtttttttttt. Unfortunately, that level of thinking still pervades elements of modern lsociety and it's not helped by these dreadful, dumbed down shows that are on once reputable channels
That's not how Dendrochronology works though - if you chopped down a hundred year old tree and then built a table with it and then did a dendro sample, the date returned would be a recent date and not 100 years ago because it gives you the date the tree was felled rather than the age of the tree as such. So if the show is finding old tree samples, then those trees were felled a long time ago - sure, trees felled a long time ago could then have been reused and then placed on the island, but that doesn't make that much sense. An old tree is an old tree.