Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Large Wrench Find Along With Nut and Shovel for Comparison. |
I haven't been to the Indian River Ridge site for about a week, but did about an hour of metal detecting there last night. For me the most interesting new find was the large wrench shown above. It fits the nut very nicely.
What this is showing is how a metal detecting site is very much like a puzzle and each find is something like a piece of a puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle fit together just like the nut fits the wrench. When you find one thing, it tells you to be alert for other things that should go with it. When you put the finds together, you see more of the picture.
On this site I first I found a lot of spikes, and later some bolts and other things. If you have spikes you know there were hammers. I found some of those before long.
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| Railroad Spike and Hammer Head. |
Similarly, after finding a lot of bolts and nuts, I found the wrench that goes with them.
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| Wrench That Fits Nut and Nut That Fits Bolt. |
The tools would have been used by workers, so you can expect other items that would be used by the workers.
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| Bolt, Nut, Wrench, Cups and Spoon. |
And I found buttons from work clothes, whisky flasks, drinking cups and yesterday I also found a spoon. The spoon might not be railroad related. It came from an area where there was a lot of more recent junk, so it might not have anything to do with the railroad items.
Another piece of the puzzle I picked up yesterday is part of a drum - maybe an oil drum.
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| Two Pieces of Drum and Wire From Barrel. |
These finds aren't valuable, but they illustrate how a site can develop. Each find tells you a little more about that site and other items you might expect to find. That can affect how you approach the site, and the search strategies you use.
The site keeps providing new pieces of the puzzle. As you can see, I'm still taking out large items. A variety of smaller items have been found, but so far most of the interesting ones have been big. A couple exceptions are the work garment buttons and the padlock.
I haven't spent a lot of time on this lot, especially considering the density of targets. I spend a lot of time digging through roots and the like. Much of the site is still unexplored. And I haven't really started to focus on small items, although some have been unearthed.
If you use discrimination, you can miss some important pieces of the puzzle. If I wasn't picking up iron, I would have found very little so far on this site. There is so much large iron, that after I clean up some areas I'll then focus more on smaller items, but there is a lot more large iron to remove.
If you use your finds as clues to the site, instead of hunting any random item that you might pick up, you'll be able to adjust your strategies to the site.
This site provides a great illustration. It is a stable site, which looks like it has never been detected before. Many of the items appear to be where they were originally deposited.
A wreck site or a salvage site as well as the beach in general is similar. There are clues. Finds provide information, even if they aren't what you were really hoping to find. They are pieces to the puzzle. A beach site is different in some ways. The water moves some of the puzzle pieces around. So you have to take that into account. There is that additional difficulty, but in a way it is helpful. The items on an undisturbed land site will more often be where they were origninally lost of deposited, but that doesn't tell you a lot about where to look until you have put together some of the puzzle. By reading a sifted beach you will have a good idea where to look, and the finds will tell you more about where to look, but it will be more difficutl to tell how the items got to where you found them.
On the beach, the items will be sifted and sorted more by nature, and another big difference is that more of the pieces of the puzzle may have been removed by other detectorists. On a site like the one I'm working, it looks like many of the items are still where they were originally lost or buried.
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Archaeologists discover artifacts from Mayland's first English Settlement, includin a coin from the 1600s.
Maryland's colonial history is continuing to unfold for researchers, with the newly announced discovery of three artifacts dating to the early 1600s.
The artifacts were found at the site of St. Mary's Fort — the first colonial settlement in Maryland and one of the earliest in the United States. Archaeologist Dr. Travis Parno and a team of excavators first found the site in 2019 and had been hoping to find evidence — or in archaeologist speak, "diagnostic artifacts" — that would add pieces to the historical puzzle.
"I joked with my team when we started excavating, 'if you could find me a coin that has 1634 on the front, that would be great,'" says Parno, the director of research and collection with Historic St. Mary's City (HSMC), referring to the year the first 150 English settlers arrived in Maryland...
Here is the link for the rest of that article.
Archaeologists Discover Artifacts From Maryland's First English Settlement : NPR
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The tides are not as big now, and the surf is getting down around one or two feet.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net