It's total bollocks.

The article

First, let me deconstruct the article. It is full of weasel words and vague statements.

It opens with:

Researchers claim that they have found new extraordinary evidence.

What researchers? Which evidence? Ok, this is the first sentence and they can't say everything at once, perhaps the rest of the article will make it clear.

For centuries it had been thought that Christopher Columbus’s pioneering journey in 1492 to America was Europe’s first contact with the continent. And although there is a degree of evidence that suggests a Norse settlement from 500 years earlier, all other discussions about prior discoveries have fallen into the category of pseudo science.

There's literally no information in this paragraph. (Unless you count the remark about pseudoscience as a warning of what is to come.)

But now a team of scientists claim that they have found evidence that could rewrite the history of America.

"A team of scientists", with no names, no affiliation, no titles. Also, here's the "evidence" again.

The new study states that ancient mariners visited the continent more than 1,000 years before Columbus

So a "new study" is referred to here. Where was it published? Who peer-reviewed it? As we'll find out later, there's been no peer review and the study hasn't been published yet. It's interesting that the author knows what's stated in an as yet unpublished study (perhaps he got it from the "scientists").

But what evidence did they find to back up this outrageous claim?

Yes! It's coming!

Well, the researchers from the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society – or AAPS in short –

Oh noes, this doesn't bode well.

report that a Roman sword was discovered in a shipwreck off Oak Island on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. The research shows that a Roman legionnaire’s whistle, Golden coins, part of a Roman shield and a Roman head sculpture have also been found on the island.

That's a lot of things which have been found. No indication of how they know these things are actually Roman and not later copies, or how they know that these things - if actually Roman - were brought there by Romans and not by others.

Furthermore, it has been conclusively established that the ceremonial sword is purely of Roman origin.

So the sword is conclusively Roman, what about the other Roman stuff? And the previous questions remain: how do we know this? That's what history/archaeology/science is all about. The method of finding stuff out because it ensures we arrive at the (or a) right conclusion.

And here ends the article (effectively). All it says it the someone (who?) somewhere (where?) found a sword (how?) and some other stuff which they (who?) claim is of Roman origin (how was that determined?).

The rabbit hole

So I did what I shouldn't have done and I dug deeper. All I had to go on was the mention of AAPS. I've never heard of the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society (AAPS), but from the website it doesn't look like a very academic organisation. They mostly seem to organise conferences with people who did, would, or could appear on The History Channel shows. Note that with the current state of the The History Channel, that's not something speaking in their favour.

On the AAPS site I saw an article explaining the sword finding a bit more. The finding will be in a "forthcoming white paper report", which was previewed at their fall conference and will be published in "late spring of 2016". "Several prominent AAPS academic members" are involved, though no names are given other than the one of the "lead researcher": Hutton Pulitzer.

Finally a name to go with the finding! Again not a name I recognise, but it seems Hutton Pulitzer is the man behind such websites as historyheretic.org, investigatinghistory.org, and treasureforce.com - sites apparently dedicated to "forbidden truths" and "secret codes".

At this point I stopped digging. There are some blog posts out there by apparently more reputable people who dispute that the sword is of Roman origin. I haven't looked further into that because from the above, I know enough. It's bollocks.

It's Oak Island. Kindly have your pinch of salt at the ready.

For those not familiar with the bonkers that is Oak Island, a brief summary.

Some time in the late eighteenth century three kids found a dip in the ground (on an island in which sink holes are known to occur naturally) and decided to dig in case it contained some interesting buried thing. They found nothing but their hunt got other people interested and over the course of the last couple of centuries various prospecting companies have been formed, worked the island, and gone bust successively. In the first half of the nineteenth century though excavators did uncover mysterious underground structures, booby-trapped flood tunnels, and odd artefacts like bits of gold chain, in the pit below the original dip in the ground. Most intriguingly, they found two carved stones, covered in mystical code symbols which, when deciphered, promised great riches below. These things have kept people digging ever since.

Except, none of those finds can be verified to a level that would satisfy even a slightly critical armchair enthusiast, let alone a professional historian or archaeologist. The very first mention of any of them comes decades after their supposed discovery, in a pamphlet one of the prospecting companies produced for potential investors. None of the artefacts supposedly recovered is still in existence, and no record of their discovery was made at the time. In short, the chances are that they were completely made up.

Still, that hasn't deterred people from sinking their fortunes into a literal hole in the ground. Millions of dollars and a few lost lives later, nobody has anything to show for it. The landscape of the island has been destroyed beyond recognition, any potential for archaeological or scientific discovery obliterated, and there are now so many holes that nobody knows which one is the original 'Money Pit'

Perhaps the most incredible part of the whole story is the sheer mass of theories which have surfaced as to the origin of the pit. It holds the buried treasure of the Knights Templar, it's the repository of the lost manuscripts of Francis Bacon and/or Shakespeare, it was used to hide British gold during the American Revolution, it was created by alien lizards for something or other, and it was a communal bank used by pirates (hence my own interest). All of which are based on extremely uncritical analysis of evidence which doesn't actually exist.

This 'Roman' sword (which most Roman sword experts I've heard on the subject agree is about as Roman as I am) and its associated finds are pretty much the first solid new thing to come from the island in decades, and there is no indication of how they got there. They are, in fact, the latest chapter in a whole book of fraud, deception, misleading statement and misdirection.

I would be willing to bet that in the next couple of years someone makes a lot of money off a new book about it all and/or there's an appeal for investors in a new investigation of a hole in the ground based on the idea that it contains Julius Caesar's toupee or something.

Or, as u/Polybios put it, it's total bollocks.