Written by the Treaureguide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
A flattened scrap of metal buried at the site of a 17th-century colonial fort in Maryland was once part of a suit of armor, X-rays reveal.
Archaeologists discovered the slightly concave "slab" that's "about the size of a cafeteria tray" while conducting excavations in a cellar at Historic St. Mary's City, a town in Maryland founded by European colonists in 1634, according to The Washington Post.
"At first it looked like a small piece of iron sticking out of the ground," Travis Parno, director of research and collections at Historic St. Mary's City, told Live Science, "but as we continued digging, it became larger."
After cleaning the mud-caked item, researchers had an idea of what they had pulled from the ground. However, it wasn't until they reviewed X-ray images that they could confirm it was a tasset, a piece of metal from a suit of armor that "was designed to hang from a breastplate and protect the wearer's thighs during battle," according to The Washington Post....
Here is the link for more of that article.
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Oops is what you might say when you find an OOPA. OOPA (sometimes given as OOPART) is an acronym for "out-of-place artifact.' Wikipedia says an OOPA is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest to someone that is claimed to have been found in an unusual context, which someone (usually the finder or owner) claims to challenge conventional historical chronology by its presence in that context.
There are several ways they can occur. Some are sometimes the result of what I would call a contaminated or disturbed site. For shipwrecks, it is easy enough for a shipwreck site to accumulate artifacts from various age periods, some of which might seem out of place. Sites like that aren't hermetically sealed. On beaches, sand layers come and go and it would be easy enough for an older item to be found on top of newer layers and more modern items.Items can also be misidentified or incorrectly dated.
Some are probably the result of poorly controlled recovery techniques. Detectorists might not correctly estimate the depth at which items are found, and it is always possible that excavated earth could have been turned over in the past.
Most sites are dynamic to some extent. There can be both natural and human causes. I've talked before about how earth is moved by various earth-moving animals. My yard is riddled by mole tunnels.
Critics argue that most purported OOPAs which are not hoaxes are the result of mistaken interpretation and wishful thinking, such as a mistaken belief that a particular culture could not have created an artifact or technology due to a lack of knowledge or materials. In some cases, the uncertainty results from inaccurate descriptions. For example, the cuboid Wolfsegg Iron is not really a perfect cube, nor are the Klerksdorp spheres actual perfect spheres. The Iron pillar of Delhi was said to be "rust proof", but it has some rust near its base; its relative resistance to corrosion is due to slag inclusions left over from the manufacturing conditions and environmental factors...
Here is the link for more about out-of-place artifacts. There are a number of famous ones.
Out-of-place artifact - Wikipedia
Below is the beginning of an article about a very famous OOPA - the Antikythera Mechanism.
A 2,000-year-old device often referred to as the world's oldest "computer" has been recreated by scientists trying to understand how it worked.The Antikythera Mechanism has baffled experts since it was found on a Roman-era shipwreck in Greece in 1901.
Here is the link for more about that.
Scientists unlock mysteries of world's oldest 'computer' (bbc.com)
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| Treasure Coast Silver Nip Bottle Find. |
The Silver Nip brand was first trademarked in 1928. The producer of this drink was a company called Florida Fruit Canners, Inc., which was based in Frostproof, Florida, (Justia, 2023). This company was owned by citrus tycoon Latimer “Latt” Macy, who started his citrus enterprise in 1917 when he opened Lake Reedy Packing Company in Frostproof(Florida Citrus Hall of Fame,n.d.)..
August-2023-AOM.pdf (stofthpo.com)
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| Registration for Silver Nip Clipped From the Video Below. |
And here is that very informative video.
Silver Nip | Antique Bottle Stories (youtube.com)
I just added the Silver Nip bottle to the tgbottlebarn.blogspot.com site.
Although he was not the first to plant citrus in the Frostproof area, Latt Maxcy was undoubtedly the most important citrus figure in the region’s history. He was inducted into the Florida Citrus Hall of Fame in 1971. He passed away in August of that same year...
Latimer "Latt" Maxcy - Florida Citrus Hall of Fame
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Well, yesterday was the extra day we got for leap year.
And here is a link for more about leap years.
Leap day 2024: Why do we have leap years? And how did they come about? | Live Science
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SurfGuru.com is showing a three-to-four-foot surf for the next several days with mostly east winds.
Good hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net