8/15/23 Report - Atlantic Getting Active. Spanish Florida Fort Site Found. Detectorists Find Gold Coins. Jade and Bones.

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

Source: See ufl.edu link below.

Florida and Georgia archaeologists have discovered the location of Fort San Antón de Carlos, home of one of the first Jesuit missions in North America. The Spanish fort was built in 1566 in the capital of the Calusa, the most powerful Native American tribe in the region, on present-day Mound Key in the center of Estero Bay on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Archaeologists and historians have long suspected that the fort, named for the Catholic patron saint of lost things, was located on Mound Key. Researchers have been searching for concrete evidence in the area since 2013.

“Before our work, the only information we had was from Spanish documents, which suggested that the Calusa capital was on Mound Key and that Fort San Antón de Carlos was there, too,” said William Marquardt, curator emeritus of South Florida Archaeology and Ethnology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “Archaeologists and historians had visited the site and collected pottery from the surface, but until we found physical evidence of the Calusa king’s house and the fort, we could not be absolutely certain.”...

Here is the link for more about that.

Archaeologists verify Florida’s Mound Key as location of elusive Spanish fort – Research News (ufl.edu)

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Source: See Smithsonian Magazkine link below.

Metal Detectorists Discover 2,000-Year-Old Gold Coins in Wales

Metal detectorists found the 15 rare artifacts in a field on the island of Anglesey, which sits off of Wales’ northwest coast, between July 2021 and March 2022...

The coins, known as staters, date to between 60 and 20 B.C.E. One side depicts the god Apollo, while the other features a horse surrounded by symbols...

Two friends, Peter Cockton and Lloyd Roberts, unearthed five of the coins. “Having been searching for history for over 14 years, finding a gold stater was always number one on my wish list,” says Roberts in the museum’s statement. When he located the first coin, he was thrilled. “That one coin alone,” he adds, “would have made my year.” Soon after, he found a second coin, and Cockton found three more.

Tim Watson, who located the other ten coins, was new to metal detecting. “[I] was encouraged to give it a go by my dad during lockdown,” he says in the statement. “I’d been over this field a few times and not found much of interest and then one evening literally struck gold.” After deciding to upgrade his metal detector, he found nine more in the area...

Here is the link for more about that.

Metal Detectorists Discover 2,000-Year-Old Gold Coins in Wales | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

Newbies seem to get in on big finds a lot.  

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Bones and Jade Ring in Bowl.
Source: Link below.

The skeleton, he explained, was discovered as part of a funeral offering, which was located inside platform 1E, west of the monumental complex known as Structure 1 of the El Tigre Archaeological Zone.

The ritual deposit consisted of two large-format vessels covered with ceramic bowls, like lids. One of them particularly caught the attention of archaeologists, because it contained the skeletl remains of a young individual, placed in a flexed position and who was accompanied by a colorful and well-preserved jade ring as a distinctive element. 

From the characteristics of the vessels, the deposit can be associated with the Late Classic period (600-800 AD), coinciding with the population and political heyday of El Tigre...

Here is that link.

The INAH discovers a human skeleton dressed with a jade ring, in the El Tigre Archaeological Zone

You can see the jade ring almost in the center of the photo, just to the right of the bones.  It is small.

I found a jade ring once.  It had just enough gold decoration on it to be detected.

Jade and Gold Ring Find.

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Source: nhc.noaa.gov

As I've been saying, the storm situation has been heating up.  Windy.com shows the wind changing from southeast to easterly in a couple days, and then remaining easterly for a several days.

It is time to start watching the Atlantic more closely.

Good hunting,

Treasureguide@comcast.net