Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
A stash of rare medieval coins have been discovered by metal detectorists in the Borders.
Keith Young and Lisa Stephenson unearthed the haul of 30 gold and silver coins in the Cappercleuch area in early November, though the discovery was not publicly announced until Wednesday by the Treasure Trove Unit.
The 15th century artefacts are a mixture of Scots and English coins, with English silver groats minted by King Henry V, King Edward IV, and Scottish gold demys and half-demys minted by Kings James I and II....
He is the link for the rest of the article.
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| Class Ring Find. |
There are a couple things on my mind today. One is "Spring Break" and the other is the word "perspective." I'll start with the first of those and get to the other one some other day.
If you've detected Florida beaches very much, you've probably found some class rings, and maybe a lot of them, especially if you detected some of the resort areas that were at one time or another Spring Break hot spots.
Young people going wild have a good chance of losing their class rings. Back in the seventies I lived in Fort Lauderdale, which was THE big Spring Break place at the time. I dug a good number of class ring and some of my best-ever detecting days were from Fort Lauderdale. A lot of the class rings came from the shallow water off Fort Lauderdale.
Even though Fort Lauderdale was a Spring Break hot spot, the locals got tired of it after it became very rowdy and started to discourage Spring Breakers from coming to Fort Lauderdale and they started going to other beach locations, but there were still a lot of class rings to find years after the amount of activity died down. There was a time when the beaches were so crowded, there was no room to walk between beach blankets.
One detectorist known as Arkansas Bill lived out of his van and detected whatever beaches were hot at the time and then move on. I've mentioned him before.
Class rings are among the heavier rings, so they provide an especially good way to keep your gold find totals up. There are some other types of rings that are heavier, most notably sports championship rings, but they are rare, compared to the much more common class rings.
One of my heaviest gold class ring finds was a University of Miami 14K ring that was a full ounce. Other class ring finds were nearly as heavy.
With the high price of gold, some are now silver and others are made of a junk metal. That has become more common with the higher gold prices, which as you know, are pretty high right now even if they have come off record levels.
I particularly like finding the older class rings, which look a little different than the more modern ones. The one shown below is from the 1940s. Those from the thirties and forties look more like that, unlike the more ones that feature a big colored stone.
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| 1940s Class Ring Find. |
Most class rings show the year, school and are engraved with a name, so you can often track down the owner and return those rings to their owner.
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Glass Beads and Spanish Shipwrecks: A New Look
at Sixteenth-Century European Contact on the Florida Gulf
Coast.
Abstract: Despite the considerable amount of research
devoted to the study of 16th-century contact between
Native Americans and Spaniards in Florida, little attention has been given to the impact of Spanish shipwrecks
on the lives and material culture of the Florida Indians.
Spanish land-based expeditions are traditionally presented as the principal means of European contact with
Native Americans in Florida and as the primary source
for European objects, such as glass beads. This has
created a misleading picture of what was really happening in Florida during the 16th century. Examination of
Spanish sailing routes, the types of artifacts recovered
archaeologically from the wreck sites of homebound
Spanish ships, and salvage activities of the Florida Indians reveals that Spanish shipwrecks were probably
responsible for most of the historical artifacts found on
Florida archaeological sites with 16th-century European
components. This suggests that the interactions between
Spaniards and Florida Indians had a far greater intensity
and complexity than has generally been supposed
Here is that link for that article.3/12/
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Good hunting,
TreasurGuide@comcast.net