Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
If you've been reading this blog very long you know that the blog offers more variety than Forrest Gump's proverbial box of chocolates. The range of topic includes metal detecting strategies and techniques, reading beaches, beach conditions, coins, Spanish Colonial and shipwrecks, jewelry, sea glass, bottles, fossils, etc. etc. Just yesterday, one of the topics was fishing lures. The blog isn't limited to one type of treasure even though many of the Treasure Coast readers target Spanish shipwreck coins. There are still times when you can find and benefit from other types of treasures if you are alert and recognize the value.
Besides the famous 1715 Fleet there are other shipwrecks along the Treasure Coast and that means coins and artifacts from different centuries can be found. Some of the Treasure Coast wrecks are even older than the 1715 Fleet wrecks.
I just found a good article on Spanish colonial coins from a very early Spanish colonial land site and the coins found on it. I think many of you will want to read the entire article, which features old coins like some that have been found on the Treasure Coast.
Below are some excerpts from an article entitled Numismatic History of the Charlesfort/Santa Elena Site:
The Sixteenth-Century Spanish Occupation by Heathley A. Johnson. It was published in the Legacy, the newsletter of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. It features maravedis and reales excavated at the Fort Elena site as well as plata coriente.
The illustration at the top of this post is the Table I referred to in one of the excerpts below.
Here are the excerpts.
While gold and silver were being gathered
and mined in great quantities and shipped
back to Spain, settlements on the edge of
the Spanish empire, such as Santa Elena,
saw little of this wealth. But coinage did
make its way to Santa Elena...
Table 1
shows the denomination of each coin,
the mint where they were produced,
the assayer’s mark (if legible), and the
metallic composition. “Maravedi” and
“real” are the Spanish terms for the
coin denomination. None of the coins
have a date stamped on them, but they
can be relatively dated based on their
designs. All of the maravedi coins
were minted in Spain and have some
variation of “Ferdinand and Elizabeth”
in the legend. Coins with such legends
were minted beyond the reign of these
monarchs, with the examples from Santa
Elena dating between 1520-1566...
Coins with such legends [talking about the maravedis] were minted beyond the reign of these
monarchs, with the examples from Santa
Elena dating between 1520-1566. The
1 real coins have the Habsburg Shield
design on the obverse, a change from
the previous “pillars and waves” design
that was decreed by Philip II in 1570 for
coins minted in the New World (Proctor
2015:23). Even though this decree was
issued in 1570, the change did not take
effect immediately, with 1571 being the
most commonly assumed date that coins
with this design began to be minted at
the Mexico City mint. Thus, the reales
from the site date between 1571-1587...
Besides the maravedis which were used for daily commerce, some coins minted in Mexico also were found at the site. They were of a later date. With the shortage of coinage for commerce at early colonial sites,
plata coriente was also used. Below are some examples from the same article.
Maravedis and reales older than those shown at the top of this post have been found on the Treasure Coast beaches, as have silver splash ingots. Some of those were from 16th century wrecks.
There is much more to this article that you might want to read. Below is the link.
As Cody Goddard walked along Matoaka Beach in the Chesapeake Bay, he hoped to find fossils, maybe some ancient shark teeth. Instead, the Pennsylvania man stumbled upon a 12-million-year-old whale skull...
He alerted Stephen Godfrey, Curator of Paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum, who rushed to the scene. After examining the chunk of sediment, Godfrey confirmed that Goddard had discovered a whale skull from the Miocene era, later estimated to be 12 million years old...
Here is the link for more about that.
