“during the last week of digging...”
That’s always a good reason to have some healthy skepticism about the find. It’s convenient, to say the least, to find something in the nick of time to show the people who funded your expedition.
It reminds me of the “Oak Island Mystery” show they had on cable this year. There were about seven episodes of them finding a whole lot of nothing, while telling viewers about the history of the island, and then, on the very last day, right as the one brother was about to pull the plug on the money, they found an old coin in a swamp. Right in a spot they had already checked with metal detectors, the day before, no less!
The Oak Island coins (there were two, found some period of time apart) are the first hard-datable artifacts to be found. If we saw the same show, we’ve both seen the very small body of other artifacts, dating back about 300 years, and all found in various investigations. So, no surprise there. What is surprising is, none of the inciting causes for the various excavations still exist anywhere. The cipher slab only exists in reproduction, and it was reproduced from an illustration. IMHO, the Oak Island treasure is entirely imaginary, as are the miraculous hydraulic engineers posited to have put the whole thing together in order to conceal a huge treasure that no one would ever be able to retrieve. Ridiculous.
The Arthur Stone is likewise a real artifact, wish I could say King Arthur was a real person at one time. My view is that a number of real rulers, possibly non-overlapping in a chronological sense, were conflated into the romantic legend which goes back a relatively short distance.
Camelot was boiled down from Camulodunum (Colchester), the Celtic-Roman Ambrosius Aurelianus was probably the “real” Arthur, Merlin was an older legend (and there are no sorcerors, so very much a legend), and the name Arthur was concocted or adapted in the late Middle Ages.
Arthur’s unfaithful wife the white shadow appears to have been lifted from the Mabinogeon (Llew’s wife who was produced out of flowers via enchantment), the various knights borrowed from completely unrelated and probably fictional stories, and some of the lesser known aspects of Arthur pulled from all over. His supposed conquest of western Europe appears to have come from Magnus Maximus, one of the contenders for Roman Emperor (he lost the battle and his life).