Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
Mary Rose ship had multi-ethnic crew, study shows.
One is thought to be an archer raised in the Atlas mountains in north Africa, and another may have been a carpenter who grew up in south-west Spain. Others hailed from closer to home, possibly the bustling ports of the English west country or the Thames estuary.
The most in-depth study yet of a group of men who drowned when Henry VIII’s favourite warship, the Mary Rose, sank off Portsmouth has provided fresh insight into the makeup of the crew, and the diverse nature of society in Tudor England.
Here is the link.
Mary Rose ship had multi-ethnic crew, study shows | Archaeology | The Guardian
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In my 5/8/21 post I presented an excerpt from a older post reporting on the sifting of an entire lot that yielded over 200 older and silver coins although multiple hunts with a metal detector turned up less than ten silver coins. The sifting of the lot showed how much can be missed by metal detecting. It might seem that most of the older coins at a site have been found when only a very small fraction of the coins at the site have been found. The person that sifted that lot and found the hundreds of old coins sent me the additional follow-up observations.
Hope you are doing well. It was fun yesterday to see the excerpt from one of the sifting posts. I went back to review my own writing and pictures and it brought back some really good memories.
I had already been thinking about sifting with your approach to your neighboring lot. One of my favorite detecting experiences is to have unfettered access to a promising spot (for me it needs to have at least the opportunity for very old coins) to really work well, which of course takes a tremendous amount of time and labor to do properly. It is great you are showing the larger detecting community what it takes. I doubt it will change much behavior, which is why I do not worry about finds ever drying up. Most people won't put in that kind of effort. I firmly believe the vast majority of good/great finds remain beyond the reach of a casual detecting effort.
I do have one interesting follow-up regarding that sifting lot. There was no natural border to the back of the lot but, when finds really started to diminish towards the back, I chose a rough arbitrary line to stop sifting. Last year, I noticed a parking lot had been put on the sifting lot extending from the lot at the back (I was really annoyed at myself for missing the chance to detect during construction). There was a ditch on one side of the parking lot and a berm on the opposite side. I detected those areas and found a Walking Liberty Half, Mercury dime, and silver Washington quarter! It is possible to miss items sifting, but it is more likely in my opinion that the coins came from farther back in the lot past the line where sifting stopped. Regardless, if I found those three coins within 6-8 inches of the surface, the sifting experience shows that there were many more good coins now buried under an asphalt parking lot.
Lesson: It is very difficult, if not impossible, to remove all finds from a good spot. I spent 70-80 hours on a single small lot and yet still...
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Thanks Russ.
People sometimes think they got it all when there is a lot more remaining.
On the Indian River site that I've been detecting, I haven't yet found an older coin, but I'm not surprised. I don't expect many old coins on the site, but I do expect to find some older small items and perhaps some old coins. There are several obstacles.
First, as you've seen there is a ton of big old rusty iron on the site. I've posted some of those. The big objects will mask a lot of smaller deeper items. The same thing happens on a beach. When you get a good target rich area, you'll find many of the smaller and deeper targets only after removing the large near surface targets that give off a loud signal.
On my last couple outings on the site, I found a LOT of wire, including some that was the same kind of wire used on the kegs.
The site was also covered with trees and vegetation so of course there is a lot of detritus. That means the small items will be pretty deep.
One of the more intricate items I've found on the site so far is this small hinge shown on a quarter for size comparison.
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| Small Dug Hinge. |
It was found in dirt dug while digging larger items such as the signal lens and earthenware juy bottom that I showed recently. It could have come up with the dirt I was moving then.
One notable exception is metal work clothes buttons that I dug up. Those small items could have been kept on the surface for along time if they were still attached to cloth when they were lost.y They were in detecting range for the Ace. As I've said, at some point I plan to use a more deep seeking detector, but that will be more effective once I remove most of the large items.
I suspect that any older coins will be down a foot or foot and a half. At that depth, I doubt I would detect them with the Ace even with the junk cleare out.
I plan on sifting some of the more promising areas, which will be determined from an analysis of the type and situation of items found in various areas prior to that. Those dug items will tell me something about what was going on in the various areas. There are distinct differences.
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I found the following note on the TAMU anthropology web site.
Archaeologists publish a small percentage (around 25%) of the sites they dig and thus destroy forever. At the ShipLAB we believe that the development of computer science, computer graphics, and the internet, have created an environment which can help promote a paradigm change, allowing archaeologists to survey and record faster and cheaper, and to share their primary data in real time.
(See https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/anthropology/research/shiplab/)
That is regrettable. It would seem to me that recording the data and publishing whatever results there might be would be an important part of the process of archaeology. In a day when every academic has easy and inexpensive access to a computer, I don't know why it would not be done as a part of academic discipline. In a university environment, unless things have changed dramatically since the time I was a graduate student, and that is possible, there are student assistants that could do a lot of that.
My other complaint is that so much research, a great deal of which is funded by the public, is only published in expensive professional journals, which the public can not generally access. For example, I'd like to review whatever studies there might be on wearing masks, the vaccines, etc., instead of relying on the inconsistent over-generalized questionable mess we hear on TV and the internet.
The internet, which in the blush of youth once offered the promise of being an information superhighway, has become more of a sewer. Besides being an instrument of crime and immorality, it has become a misinformation abyss, propaganda machine, instrument of surveillance, bee hive of chaos and confusion that divides people like a Tower of Babel. In the midst of all that, some useful communication occasonally occurs, but I wonder about the net effect. It isn't as ovewhelmingly positive as I'd like to think. It requires a lot of a person to filter out the noise and put together the scattered bits of real information to get any kind of meaningful understanding of what is really going on.
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It looks like we might get some bigger surf in a week or so.
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| Source: MagicSeaWeed.com |
Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net
