5/7/21 Report - Gold Bracteates Found. Good Tips for Finding Caches. Tip For Finding Good Information.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.

Seagrape Thursday.
Photo by JamminJack.

JamminJack sent the following beach report.

Report: May 6, 2021, Thursday 

Went to SeaGrape and detected towards Wabasso Beach. Only one hit going north. Nice long piece of possible corner railing for a boat. Looked like corner bead for drywall but was not magnetic and looked to be stainless steel.

Got one hit coming back. Looked like stainless steel debris.

I was at beach before 8am, and heat was brutal. Not too many people on beach. Tide was going out. Low was around 11am. Water very glassy with no wind.  Wind picked up a little, but still very smooth ocean. Very mushy close to water edge. Trough was building in front of 1st reef. Dirt looked very brown and thick. You can tell it will take a lot of storms to get this off the reef. The dune line was really tall most of the way down.

Thanks Jack.

You can see the small shell bits on the beach front.  Looks like a nice day for snorkeling.

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Found Gold Bracteate.
Source: See link below.

Seven gold pendants – known by the name of bracteates – were found in a field and near a small hill at the edge of the field.

If this spot was in fact a place where gold bracteates would have been laid down for sacrifice, it has been disturbed in modern times by farming.

Save for an assembly of gold artefacts which included one bracteate which was found in Møre og Romsdal in 2014, it has been 70 years since similar findings were done in Norway.

“Such votive hoards are incredibly rare”, three archaeologists write in a blogpost on forskning.no (link in Norwegian)...

Here is that link if you want to read more of that article.

Seven rare gold pendants were sacrificed 1500 years ago in Østfold county of Norway (sciencenorway.no)

And here is more on the subject of bracteates from the foskning archaeological blog referenced above. 

In 2019, a private metal finder and archaeologist from Viken County Council found four goldbraktater in a field in Råde. In the autumn of 2020, the Museum of Cultural History conducted an archaeological survey and made the discovery of three more pieces at a rock on the edge of the field. In total, the seven gold units constitute a repository that has been disrupted by agricultural work in modern times. It is extremely rare to find such large gold victim depots. In addition to one from 2014 at Tornes in Møre og Romsdal, it has been over 70 years since similar discoveries have been made in Norway.

I think you'll find those articles interesting.  

I did some more research on bracteates and found a  very good study on bracteates that discusses the distribution of finds.  Any serious detectorist will find that both interesting and helpful.

Here is the link.

2015 (89) 145-152 Scott.pdf (le.ac.uk)

Notice that it links to a pdf file.  Academic links will often be in pdf files, so when you do a search, if you want to locate good academic studies, as opposed to basic discussion, include the search term pdf in your search.  Dan B. mentioned that to me several years ago, and I found it very helpful.

The link immediately above will take you to an article entitled Studies in Gold Bracteates, which was authored by Morten Axboe of the National Museum of Denmark.  Here are a few paragraphs talking about the distribution of bracteate finds.

First I should say that bracteates seem to have a lot of uses.  It seems they were used as coins, pendants, and sacrificial offerings.  Take a look at a the article to learn more about that. 

Below are the exerpts.  Notice particularly where the finds were made.  That information will be particularly useful if you are interested in finding a cache, and what detectorist isn't.

So where have such caches been found?  There are the sacrificial caches found in bogs and other places where they were evidently not meant to be retrieved.  

Other caches were found at property boundaries, inside house foundations and beneath house posts or near house posts.  

When you have a specific type of cache in mind, the type or purpose of the cache will have something to do with where it is deposited.

There is really a lot of useful information there, not to mention the reference to the 1989 Hines article.

Don't miss out on good clues.  Look for the general principles illustrated by specific cases and think about how those principles might apply to what you are doing.

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The current Sedwick auction goes live at 10 AM this morning.  You can watch the bidding.

Treasure, World, U.S. Coin & Paper Money Auction 29 - Session 1 - Page 1 of 6 - Daniel Frank Sedwick, LLC (sedwickcoins.com)

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I am trying to make some illstrations on bottle hunting techniques. y I've had some questions about that, and have been having a lot of fun finding bottles lately.  A lot of it is the same as metal detecting.  Things work the same.  Bottles are just not as dense as coins or gold jewelry.  Otherwise much of it is the same.  

No big changes in beach conditions expected soon.

Happy hunting,

TreasureGuide@comcast.net