7/17/20 Report - Metal Detecting on Vacation. Odd Ring Find. Apply The Context of The Appropriate Time and Place.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Silver Mine in Colorado.

This time of year Floridians often think of vacations in cooler areas.  I always enjoyed Colorado, and took the photo shown above.  You can probably see the silver mine in the middle of the photo.

Metal detecting new places, whether it is a Caribbean Island or the Rocky Mountain,s is always fun but presents the challenge of not knowing the site as well as you would on your home turf.

Detecting a resort in the Caribbean is very much like detecting a Florida beach.  One difference is the hot rocks on some of the Caribbean islands..  

One thing I'd recommend if you ever get the chance is taking the train from Durango to Silverton.  Silverton is an small old mining town that looks like a Western TV set, and the train passes some of the most amazing scenery you'll see anywhere.  

I saw a fellow dredging in the water shown below as the train neared Silverton.  Of course the water is much cooler than ours.

Nearing Silverton Colorado.

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When I was looking through some old photos I noticed a picture of an odd ring find that I put away in a box a long time ago.  I decided to take another look at it, now that I have a good digital telescope and considerably more experience than when I originally found the ring.

The ring was gold gilt or plated and had a very hard black encrustation with shells embedded.  The black crust is unusual and looks like blacktop, though I am sure it is not.  

I decided to do some cleaning on the ring, and managed to move some of the stubborn encrustation, but also in the process removed much most of the gold gilt.

Two Photos of the Half Cleaned or Half Dirty Ring.

As you can see a lot of the gilt was removed by the acid.  That is one thing that can happen with acid cleaning.

I'm still curious about the odd shape of the ring and wondered if anyone has any idea of age or anything else.

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We often judge previous generations by 21st century context or our own standards.  I was watching the Finding Your Roots TV show on PBS, and it was mentioned that one of the guest's ancestors was a slave and slept on a sack of straw.  They responded to "sack of straw" with horror, as if it was some kind of torture.  The evils of slavery are well known, but sleeping on a sack of straw was not an indignity.

Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life cites an 18th century book, Good-Holmes Cyclopedia, which lists ten mattress types or stuffings.  The listed mattress fillings are down, feathers, wool, wool-flock, hair, cotton, wood-shavings, sea-moss, sawdust, and straw.  Bryson goes on to state, "Historically, the most basic common filling was straw."  Did they think that everyone in the 18th century were sleeping on Sealy Posturpedic mattresses with My-Pillow bed toppers.  Any mattress might be considered an option, and often pioneer beds, if there was one, were nothing more than wood shelves.

Thirteen.org described frontier bedding as follows:

Bedding on the frontier was, predictably, less than luxurious. While some families hauled featherbeds and pillows to their new homes, many people had to create their beds on the frontier. The simplest beds were rough bunks, consisting of wooden planks supported by boards or pegs. These "sleeping shelves," which merely kept the sleeper off the floor, were simply covered over with blankets and quilts. Other homesteaders stuffed their own mattresses, utilizing materials that were readily available on the frontier, such as prairie grass or buffalo hair. However, one newspaper warned that "A bed of 'prairie feathers' [cut grass] is not very comfortable at any time, and warmth is not one of its inherent qualities." Regardless of what material they were stuffed with, homemade mattresses were placed on wooden frames, with "bedsprings" comprised of tightly stretched rope.

I read that the expression "sleep tight" originally referred to that rope being stretched tight.

Here is that link.

https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay5_3.html

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The blogger editor is slow and cumbersome.  I'm going to have to make some changes before long.  I've been putting it off.

No storms to watch.  Hot weather.  Flat surf and small tides on the Treasure Coast.  

Happy hunting,

Treasureguide@comcast.net