Treasure Beaches Report: Pt. 2. (2020 and Beyond). : 4/16/26 Report - First Machine Gun(?). Coastal Erosion and Archaeological Sites. Great Site to View Spanish Colonial Artifacts.

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

The trail of an ancient Greek “machine gun”

Researchers identified clusters of quadrangular cavities arranged at short, regular intervals and following a curved path near the Vesuvian and Herculaneum gates. The shape and spacing of these marks closely match the profile of the projectiles fired by this machine, confirming that they were not caused by any other weapon currently known to archaeologists...

The polybolos, which literally translates as “multiple launcher,” was invented by Dionysius of Alexandria, a Greek engineer who worked in the weapons workshop of Rhodes in the 3rd century B.C. Its design was remarkably sophisticated for its time. The weapon used a system of gears and a chain mechanism to load darts automatically and fire them in bursts. In practice, it operated much like a modern machine gun that uses a belt-fed ammunition system...

Here is the link for more about that.

Archaeologists find evidence in Pompeii of an 'automatic' weapon used more than 2,000 years ago - AS USA

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I found an interesting archaeological survey of coastal sites being eroded or vulnerable to erosion. Several Treasure Coast coastal sites are being eroded. The salvage camps are included, but there are also sites whether human activity or nature has deposited different kinds of treasure in the vulnerable dune areas and are periodically eroded. Much of this archaeological survey applies in the same way to those Treasure Coast sites.

Here are a few excerpts from the archaeological article.

Although our work identified previously unreported sites, professional archaeological survey has not been as effective a way to add to the site inventory as meeting with local residents. In the western Quoddy Region, the only newly identified site was reported by a collector (see Hrynick and Anderson Reference Hrynick and Anderson2021). In Nova Scotia, six of the newly identified sites were reported by collectors, including the most surprising addition to the site inventory: a Palaeoindian point recovered on an eroding shoreline (Betts et al. Reference Betts, Hrynick and Pelletier-Michaud2018). The disparity between avocational and professional identification of sites probably occurs because local residents tend to walk along beaches all year, rather than just for a few weeks during each summer. As a result, they have had many opportunities to identify eroding archaeological sites...

Ten or twenty years ago I did a post suggesting that archaeologist quit portraying the public as the enemy, first and most importantly, because the purpose of archaeology is to save history "for the public" and secondly because the public, if not alienated, will advance archaeology in several ways. The public will make discoveries, as this article describes. Avocational archaeologists contribute in many ways to archaeology and the public, if properly involved, will protect sites. Unfortunately, there are always dishonest individuals that put private gain before public interest, but that applies to archaeologists as well as the general public. Saving history for the public doesn't mean hiding it from the public.

I do believe that since the time when I did that post, some progress has been made and the public is not so routinely viewed as the enemy of archaeology as was previously the case.

Fifty-five flaked lithic artifacts from Sipp Bay are recorded in the RSPI collections. Some were excavated by Stoddard in 1951, but the vast majority were collected from the beach and erosional face by Kingsbury, Hayward, and the Knapton brothers. The collection reflects an opportunistic, visual collecting strategy: 20 of the 55 artifacts are bifaces, 21 are flakes, 12 are utilized flakes or unifaces, and two are cores. The catalog numbers used here refer to the RSPI’s system from the time of Stoddard’s research and are usually written on the artifacts.

Artifacts on the beach and in the water have often been eroded from the dunes.

The implication of this work is clear and unsurprising: coastal archaeological sites on the Maritime Peninsula are rapidly eroding and have been substantially eroded. As others (e.g., Young et al. Reference Young, Belknap and Sanger1992) have suggested, coastal erosion has preferentially obliterated older portions of the archaeological record in this region.

Here is the link for the entire article.

Characterizing the Erosion of Coastal Archaeological Sites on the Maritime Peninsula Using Survey, Collection Analysis, Excavation, and Modeling | American Antiquity | Cambridge Core

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Below is a small sample from nice web site showing the artifacts of 16th Century Isabella.