6/1/21 Report - Oldest Found Gold German Artifact. Strategies and Methods and Reason Behind Them.

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

Source: See Live Science link below.

... It's considered the oldest gold artifact found in southwest Germany. "The gold contains about 20% silver, less than 2% copper, and has traces of platinum and tin. This composition points to a natural gold alloy typical of gold washed from rivers," a chemical composition that suggests it came from the Carnon River area in Cornwall, England...

Here is the link for more about that.

Oldest gold artifact in southwest Germany found | Live Science

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If you've been reading this blog over the years, you know I am a dig-everything kind of guy.  I don't generally recommend discrimination, but there are situations when it should be used.  One situation when you need discrimination is when there are junk targets along with possibly good targets but you don't have much time.

I always start out by looking at the situation.  Different situations require different strategies.  After doing a preliminary analysis of the situation, informed by any prior research, some sampling will help you complete the initial analysis.

There are times when you need to move quickly and there are some situations when you can take all the time you might need.  Sites vary in the amount of time pressure you will face, and so you have to adjust the strategy to the situation.

I've been mentioning some of the differences between metal detecting at the beach and on an inland site.  Those sites can differ in the amount of time you have to work the site.

There is always some time pressure when you work the shallow water or front of the beach.  Those areas can change daily.  If you find a good productive hole, you might come back the next day or even for the next tide cycle, and find everything completely changed.  You have an unlimited amount of area of beach to detect, but there is a definite time pressure that nature provides.

On a back beach where the water doesn't change the beach very often or very much, you might face time pressure caused by humans.  There might be other detectorists or construction projects, for example.  The same thing applies to inland sites.  Other detectorists might metal detect a site regularly or there might be a road or construction project that disrupts everything.

Then there are inland sites where you might be the only detectorist that has access and no change is expected, such as the Indian River Ridge site that I am currently working.  I have plenty of time to work that one thoroughly

On a front beach, I'd recommend starting out without discrimination because even junk targets tell you something a lot, but after a little sampling you might decide to use a some amount of discrimination.  You can continually adjust the amount of discrimination you are using.

On a back beach, you might know the particular beach well enough to determine if you need discrimination or not, but I always like to remove junk because eventually you'll end up with a nice clean beach to detect, and I'd rather detect a nearly junk free beach than one littered with a lot of junk.  The same goes for parks or other types of sites, although junk can protect some good targets from other detectorists who have a habit of missing certain kinds of finds.  It helps to know something about both the site and the other detectorists that regularly work the site.  It doesn't take long to determine the detecting habits of others by what they leave behind.

Moving to the type of site that you can detect with no time pressure, you might want to clean it out.  That will give you the opportunity to learn all you can about the site, work it thoroughly and find everything that is there that could possibly be found by a metal detector as well as any other methods, you might use, such as sifting.  If you really want to know the history or story behind a site, or if you are simply interested in finding everything that is there - not just the metal items - you will want to do some sifting.

I am using the Indian River Ridge site for several purposes.  One is personal enjoyment.  Two is curiosity, and wanting to figure out what went on there.  Three is for educational purposes.  I want to illustrate what can happen when you work a site in a particular way.  I might enjoy or make use of some of the finds, but I'm not expecting any valuable finds.  An added benefit is learning more about my metal detectors and metal detecting in general.  I certainly know more about  both of the metal detectors I've used a lot on that site now.

There are a lot of people that would never hunt a site like that, and if they did, would not stick to it very long.  It is too difficult and aggravating, and there are no great finds expected.  

Know yourself as well as the situation and adjust accordingly.  "Worked-out" is more of a relative term for some people.  For some people, a site will quickly be determined to be worked-out.  If they discriminate everything but coins and search in only the obvious places, it won't take long for a site to be declared worked out, but there still might be some very good targets on the site just waiting to be discovered.  Maybe those finds are not the easy ones.  Maybe they are hidden by some very stubborn obstacle.  If you just do the same things the same way, a site will quickly appear worked out.  The trick is to approach things in different ways.  Use additional methods you never used before.

A worked-out site is often declared as being worked-out prematurely.  If you change up some things, you'll almost always find there is more to be found.  That has been my experience.

There are many ways to increase finds when a site seems to be worked out.  One of those is sifting.  

There are often some good non-metallic finds on a site.  I've shown, for example, a couple old bottles that I dug up while digging metal targets.  They had no metal on them.  They weren't detected.  There are more of those on the site for sure.  I do not want to leave all of them simply for the lack of using a suitable method.

Recently Dug Full Pint Bottle With Metal Cap
and What Looks Like Part Of Some Sort of Carrier

On the beach, some of my favorite finds have been non-metallic.  Those were made visually.  Eye-balling is a skill that can be improved with practice.

I started the Indian River Ridge site not having reason to believe much of anything would be there.  I was surprised.  Surprise is one of the joys of metal detecting.

As it turned out I unwittingly picked one of the most difficult sites I've ever worked, and that includes bouncing up and down trying to metal detect in very rough water when the waves gave me a headache from repeatedly hitting me in the head and knocking off my earphones.  Not only is some of this site still covered with vines, trees and brush that keeps getting tangled in my coil and wires and pulling off my headphones, but it is covered with tons of rusty junk some of it so fine that you can't see it in the leaves and twigs when you hold it in your hand.  I described the site as recently cleared, but it is not completely cleared and there is still a lot of branches and vines that make some of it difficult to get detect.  

One thing this detecting site shows is how a site that shows no visible signs of having any targets can be hiding tons of objects and some history that can be unwrapped little by little.

Below are some more recent finds from that site.

Part of a Big Spring Probably From a Railroad Car.

The big spring seems to support the idea that the railroad items on the site came from a derailing.  Also, the buried tank car on another lot not too far away supports that theory.

I also dug some more spikes, a bolt and the hook shown below.

Rusty Old Hook.

I also found these pieces of a shoe, which seems to have no relationship to the eyelets and hooks I found on another part of the site.

Part of Shoe FounYesterday.

As inconsequential as the shoe parts seem to be, it bears a trademark, which I was able to date to no earlier than 1985.  The shoe parts came from a part of the site that has a lot of recent junk.

It seems to me that much of the railroad stuff is from the first half of the 20th century, while much of the junk in the area along the northwest side of the site seems to be from the last half of the 20th century.

I suspect that only a small fraction of the buried bottles on the site have been recovered.  Most of the older ones would not have metal screw caps and so were not detected.

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Concerning the mystery item shown in my 5/27 post, here is what Scott B. said. 

   As a kid I used to dig an old dumping site outside Atlanta and used to find what you had as your mystery item on 5/27. Since I’ve been detecting the past eight or so years, I’ve also found some. Long ago somebody told me they were old batteries. I’m not sure if that’s correct, but that’s what I always thought they were.

   I hope you and all your readers have a safe Memorial Day.

Respectfully,

   Scott

75% of the opinions I received on that item are support the battery interpretation.

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I hope you didn't miss some of the posts over the weekend that showed a lot of Spanish colonial coin and artifact finds.  You might want to go back and check out those posts if you missed them.

Happy hunting,

TreasureGuide@comcast.net