Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Saturday Finds From My Railroad Wreck Site. |
As you know, I've been spending a lot of time metal detecting what I've been calling the Indian River Ridge site. It is an informal experiment and a demonstration project. If you are a relic hunter or amateur archaeologist, you might find it interesting, but if you are a coin shooter you might not find it very interesting even though there is a lot that can be learned from such an experiment. I've learned a lot from the project and gained a lot of valuable experience. I've tested two detectors on the site and various techniques and strategies for dealing with a site littered with tons of what coin shooters might call trash and relic hunters might call treasure.
I expected the site to provide very little in the way of treasure. It is an old site, that as far as I knew, had seen little activity. Boy was I wrong on that count. Having found some good items in some of the most out of the way untraveled-looking places, I always expect to be able to find something of some interest.
I've put in a lot of time on this site and found a lot of rusty junk from the pre-WWII era, but older coins eluded me up until last night. From the amount of relics, I guessed there must be some older coins, even if they are few. It took removing a lot of iron first, but finally I found the first older coin on the site Saturday evening.
I haven't been able to detect this site as systematically and thoroughly as I'd like. Too many bushes and trees remain. I'm occasionally cutting back vegetation to get into new areas. Sometimes I have to return with an ax to remove heavy roots.
I decided to do a little detecting on the Indian River Ridge site last in the evening after things started to cool off a little. I hadn't done any detecting there for a week or more, due to heat, thunderstorms, etc. I was going to take it easy and just do a short hunt. I didn't even take my ax or magnet, both of which, I could have used. I just poked around a little and passed up some targets for another time.
Included in the finds are a heavy another spike, a big iron handle, piece a piece looks something like a heavy knife blade, and the usual wire and junk, before I finally found a wheat cent dated 1941.
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| 1941 Wheat Cent Showing Almost No Circulation Wear. |
As you can see the wheat cent was lost before showing any wear from circulation.
I've found dated items from the early 1900s up through the thirties on this site, and putting the accumulating clues together, I was starting to think the wreck or whatever caused the hundreds of railroad items being buried, occurred in the prewar period - late 30s or very early 40s. From the evidence I've gathered, 1941 or 1942 would now be my best guess for the time most of the items were buried.
As you probably know, I've removed hundreds of iron items from the site, and this is the first older coin I've found. I was using the Ace, and it gave a good solid strong coin reading. The cent was not particularly deep but was in an area surrounded by some small bushes and trees and littered with some bits of scattered aluminum foil. I previously removed some of the foil in that general area, and some of the remaining bits were removed just before finding the cent. The smaller coil on the Ace helped get into the small space. The coin was not deep, but the vegetation and other junk had protected it to some extent. There are probably at least a few more old coins on the site that I haven't gotten to yet.
The key was found just a few feet away from the cent. You might remember the padlock I found on the site way back when I started working this site, and I said I wanted to find the key to it. I don't know if this is the key to the padlock. I doubt it. It was found pretty far away from the padlock. The key is badly corroded and in poor condition.
It took a lot of hours before I finally dug this coin. If I was a coin shooter, I would have discriminated out a lot of the iron and maybe found the coin earlier or maybe not found it at all. It would be easy for a coin shooter to give up on the site after a short while.
I've talked a lot before about discrimination and the indications and contraindications. It depends upon what you want to find and your estimation of the situation.
If you are a coin shooter and that is all you are interested in finding, the Indian River Ridge site has shown a very small number of good targets. If you are a relic hunter or amateur archaeologist, you might be interested in a lot more of the targets, perhaps almost everything besides modern junk, nails and wire, and the site would present something closer to a 50/50 distribution of good to trash targets.
Your estimation of the relative number of junk to good targets would dramatically affect the optimum discrimination strategy. I'll elaborate on that in the future. Obviously, if you have a very few trash targets in an area, there is little gained by discrimination, and perhaps something to be lost.
When I began this project, I wanted to address the issue of when you can say a site is worked out. I don't know that I've ever seen a truly worked out site. The pickings can get slim, but in my opinion there is almost always something good remaining. You might have to go deeper, extend your boundaries, remove obstacles, or use different strategies or techniques. You might decide there are better locations and move on, but my attitude is that there is almost always something left, even if it takes a lot of time and effort, and perhaps some creativity, to get to it. For me, it is seldom a question of whether there anything there - it is more of a question of can you get it, what will it take, and is it worth it. That will depend largely upon your interests, goals and skills.
I guess there are two ways to define a worked-out site. If you define a worked-out site as a site that no longer contains any good targets (absolute numbers), I'd say there are very few truly worked out sites. If on the other hand, you use a subjective criteria, and consider a site worked out when you no longer feel like the time and effort is justified, that is a relative definition, which could be changed by gathering more information or changing how you work the site.
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Still no improvement in beach conditions. No storms developing. Smooth surfu.
I'd like to see some rough surf.
For one particular spot, I'd like to see some good surf from the southeast.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net