Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Couple Interesting Finds by Alberto S. Photo by Alberto S. |
Alberto found this shark tooth and wood with a spike in it Tuesday. Interesting finds!As you can clearly see, Alberto is very skilled photographer. I've posted some of his images before, but he turned these finds into a work of art.
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| Another View of The Same Objects. Photo by Alberto S. |
Alberto is interested in receiving thoughts on these finds, particularly the wood and spike.
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A shortage of silver caused by the collapse of leading Bronze Age civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean about 1200 B.C. resulted in the original "dirty money" — several hundreds of years before coins had been invented.
The ancient counterfeiting was revealed by archaeologist Tzilla Eshel, then a doctoral student at the University of Haifa, who studied the chemical composition of 35 buried hoards of Bronze Age silver found at archaeological sites around Israel.
In eight of the hoards — dating from the time of the "Late Bronze Age collapse," when the region's most powerful kingdoms suffered often-violent demises — had been deliberately debased, with cheaper alloys of copper substituted for much of the silver and an outer surface that looked like pure silver...
I've addressed this before, but I've heard people say that silver plating is a modern process so if you find a silver plated item it is modern. Of course electroplating is a modern process but for thousands of years various methods of plating or layering have been used.
These so-called "counterfeit" items were discovered when a doctoral student studied the chemical composition of the coins and found the copper items to have a silver surface. I'm not sure if I would call it counterfeiting. We have clad coins, and they aren't counterfeits, but they are not meant to deceive. I don't know if the debasing of these items was to deceive or not, but I guess the experts think they were.
Determining the metal content of a find is one of the most important things you can do when you are trying to date or identify an object. I am surprised by how often people neglect to do that. These days an XRF analysis is the way to go if you can get it done, but when you can't, an acid test can still be very helpful.
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Idaho hikers and historians have teamed up in an effort to uncover a 120-year-old route used by miners during one of the last gold rushes in American history, and this week they shared updates on the project during a virtual gathering...
The Idaho Trails Association has partnered with the Forest Service to try to survey three sections of the trail, which Zedalis said was originally about 50 miles long. According to a Heritage Program history of the trail, it was created after brothers Ben and Lou Caswell struck gold in the late 1890s near Thunder Mountain, about 75 miles east of McCall in what is now part of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness...
Here is the link for more about that.
Sounds like fun to me.
That reminds me of the time I saw a this mule train coming down a mountain in the Grand Tetons. I still wish I had asked what they were carrying.
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| Mule Train in The Tetons. |
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