Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Spear Point Found by TM In A Shell Line. |
Yesterday I posted a picture of a broken spear point that I found a long time ago. TM thanked me for posting the spear point and sent this photo of a spear point he found a couple years ago in the shell line north of Sebastian Inlet.
I looked through the following reference and thought this one looked more like a Clovis while the one I showed yesterday maybe looked like an Adena-Early Woodland Period. Those are very different periods, but I know nothing about dating these things. Maybe someone can put the correct label on them.
Cultural_Resources_Point_Guide.pdf (usda.gov)
Stone projectile points are not common finds, but they are out there and will occasionally show up on some beaches. I've seen example that came from a variety of Treasure Coast beaches.
I haven't seen many good shell piles in recent years, but I haven't been out a lot so maybe I missed some.
It also seems like a long time since I've seen any good cuts. There are cuts and then there are cuts. Some are in renourishment sand or newly accumulated sand and might not be worth much. The amount of renourishment sand around the Treasure Coast is huge now. Even when it erodes, it can stay in front of the beach, protect the beach from wave energy and then was back up again. It can also flow south with the near shore currents and protect beaches to the south. There is always a chance that there isAr something old or good in the renourishment sand.
As I've sand many times before, some beach trends are short term and some long term. I was looking back through some old posts and noticced that it was in 2010 that we had some good high tides and big dune erosion and then again in 2020. That, of course, is ten years apart. Those events also resulted in a lot of fossils being exposed, as well as other things.
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I found a link to a Historic Artifact Handbook that you might find useful. The intent of that book is to provide site recorders with little or no background in historic artifact identification sufficient information so that they can provide consistent descriptive information about the artifacts and site features they are observing. It isn't in technical language and doesn't include a lot of academic detail. It provides basic, but useful information, for the amateur.
Here is the link.
Microsoft Word - handbook.doc (alpinearchaeology.com)
Here is some of the kind of information it contains.
White Milkglass ca. 1890s-present Aqua ca. 1800-1920s Green ca. 1860s-present Amber or Brown ca. 1860s-present Cobalt Blue ca. 1890s-present Purple ca. 1885-1920 Yellowish ca. 1918-1920s
It has sections on bottles, buttons, bear cans, and many other things as well as a good bibliography at the end.
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There is one beach I hunted for nearly twenty years. I would find a variety of things there. There were some OK finds, but no treasure coins or anything really good. Then one day, after all those years, I hit a really outstanding couple of finds there. A couple of my best ever finds. I could have easily missed them too, if I had only walked one direction rather than the other. I thought something good should be there, but could have easily given up on that beach if it wasn't for the occasional OK find that told me there should be something good there.
The point of that is that you can easily conclude that a particular beach will never produce anthing good and give up on it simply because you haven't hit it yet. It can take a long time. ,
For some beaches, especially big long beaches, there are a lot of things that have to go right. You have to be at the right area at the right time.
It always helps when a beach has already shown you that you can find some good things there, and it is easy to give up on beaches where you haven't found anything even though you've hunted it a lot.
When you finally get something at a beach like that, you then know what has to happen for that one spot to open up and produce, but there may still be other goodies hidden in other area of the same beach that you haven't yet discovered
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We are having some good tides now, including some good low tides. The surf is small too. Maybe a good time to hit some low tide areas.
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This country is going down the tubes fast. Can't feed your babies, can't get a broken tooth fixed for two or three weeks. Congratulations. Building Backwards Badder.
Good hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net