Hi Dana
You friends theory about ships ballast is certainly credible . Ivor Noel Hume ; All the best Rubbish . Victor Gollance Ltd 1974. ( a delightful book ) quotes a Roman Sestarius of the Emperor Nero found near Bennets Point Maryland and a South Italian coin of around 300 BC found amongst other colonial rubbish on an estuary near to the eighteenth century town of Woodstock , North Carolina . The author who is an established archaeologist concludes that the poor condition / low numismatic interest of the coins made it unlikely for them to have been lost by some eighteenth century colonial collector. As evidence of the ballast theory he cites a nineteenth century wreck investigated in 1972 near Jacksonville , Florida which revealed large quantities of rubbish dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth century . The implication was that the ballast came originally from dredging of the Thames in London but the same could presumably said for any port trading regularly with the Americas.
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