“It was an absolutely magic moment,” said Guillaume Blondel, the excavation leader. “We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago—it was a total surprise.”
The 2,000-year-old site sits on a cliff and is in danger due to coastal erosion. So, the team is volunteering in an emergency effort to learn as much as they can about its history before it’s gone for good.
The glass vial was the kind that 19th-century women filled with smelling salts and wore around their necks.
The bottle was not the oldest object at the site, but it was the rarest find. It isn’t every day that a well-preserved, intact note from the 19th century is discovered. It may even be the oldest message in a bottle ever found.
According to Guinness World Records, the oldest recorded message in a bottle was found by Kym and Tonya Illman in 2018 on Wedge Island, Australia.
It was written by a German ship captain in 1886. At the time of its discovery, it was 131 years old. Now, the recently discovered bottle will be added to the collection of known time capsules.
“Sometimes you see these time capsules left behind by carpenters when they build houses. But it’s very rare in archaeology,” Blondel said.
“Most archaeologists prefer to think that there won’t be anyone coming after them because they’ve done all the work!”
