schoolofhardNox

Must be that they were dropped after the silver was pulled from circulation. So I'm thinking the late 80's early 90's was the start of them dropping coins there. Hey don't throw them mangled pennies out.... torture then by melting them and casting something with them. Zincolns deserve a cruel death 😄

Nice draped bust large cent!! Just missed the Liberty capped ones. Flat buttons and early large cents.... your in a good spot.

Someone lost there lucky coin 😄 In great shape too. Recent drop for sure. Great find!

Nice copper. I usually tooth pick around the date gently and rub with my fingers to see what the date is. I rarely find that series half cents for some reason. Great find.

Awesome hunt. Rough waters must be brutal on the body after a while. Day off the next day I'm assuming? 😄

Let's see the back of that oval buckle. That one looks like a knee buckle. Is it pewter or brass? Great find!

Great hunt. Keep pounding that place to get some of the older stuff that's hiding deeper. The buckle in question looks to me to be a suspender buckle rather than a colonial buckle. The back side would ID it better. If it looks like it was stamped when made, as opposed to being solid, then it's a suspender buckle. Plus the little curled piece with the tongue part is like a suspender buckle. Ages range from the mid 1850's on up.

Nice, fancy gold piece. It seems that for rings, people turn to cheaper stainless steel, tungsten, etc. But for religious items, I'm seeing more gold crosses and pendants being lost than before. At least they are losing gold 😁

Funny, I remember when I got the DFX that I thought it was too sparky compared to the Eagle Spectrum which was smooth as silk. Now I look back at the DFX and go .... That's not sparky! 😄

agreed.

I'm sticking to the UFO theory 😆 Yep random shell drops are probably common by the shore. Here inland, there are small but packed shell middens that are the result of repeated layering of discarded shell. Their trash pits. The good thing is that there are usually other items discarded as well. When they are metallic, that is when they are located by detectors. The projects are great when they come about. Pequot War, King Philip War, various battles at waterways, and swamps, war of 1812, etc... haven't done a Rev war site yet. If you have a chance to get involved, try it out. It just takes some discussion on how to keep you digging technique in line with the requirements they need in order to log the artifacts in accurately. Once they understand that you understand how to do it, they usually turn you loose. Most don't realize how many artifacts you can locate in a single day. They are not used to volume. In the first project, they would just love to recover one brass kettle point that they know should exist, along with some round ball. That was done the first day along with probably 30 or more war related items. Total for that part of the project probably ran well into the hundreds. Following the rest of the trail probably led to 500 other war related items and many kettle points. That is what will make metal detecting a necessity for battle field archaeology.

Thanks. I'm lucky to work with this group of people for over 10 years now. I don't see archaeologists in general working toward a joint effort in preserving history together unfortunately. Probably what will happen is the new generation of archaeologists will learn to detect just enough to find stuff. Then they will not need us, thinking they got it all. There will always be some cooperation between the ones that understand that we have vast experience over someone new coming into the hobby, no matter how many degrees they have 😄 But to some extent, I can see their point. Just in the past year I have seen posts of people finding multiple Kettle points from some "private" sites. They don't realize they are removing artifacts that could lead to an unknown village, trading post or a summertime hunting camp. In a perfect world, that information would go to archaeologists who could then test pit the area locating shell middens, pottery, bone and wampum. History is lost that way, so I get their point. You should see how excited they get over shells in the dirt😲. It usually means occupation, aka a hut or wigwam. So, again looking over the image on the ring, I'm now thinking it depicts a scene of plowed land and then a background of hills and maybe some sort of occupation (house, barn etc...) Probably a typical 17th century English homestead. Or it's UFO's 😆

Thanks. That was in the field, so maybe there will be better pictures later. Maybe an x ray would show it all. They do that on some coins, but the only draw back is that you see both the obverse and reverse in one image 😄 It is a nice area down there by the coast.

Love those dimes. They look so old, better looking than if they are cleaned up. Great saves.

So it was my yearly visit to talk and basically train some new field school students about metal detecting. I do this pretty much every year and it's just some basic training and some hands on digging and pinpointing. Just very basic stuff. This year's students numbered about 20 from all parts of the country, and I must say they were a pretty enthusiastic bunch. Nice to see the youngins showing some effort. 😄 This is one of my favorite spots to detect, as it is a Native village site that dates to the 1630's and happens to be one that the English attacked on their withdrawal from Mistick Fort on May 26, 1637. This place just keeps giving up artifacts and by the time we are done there, it should give an extremely detailed account of how they lived and worked. Of course everything is documented by archaeologists and added to the collection and we keep nothing (except 22 bullets 😡). Hey free lead 😁 I didn't get pictures of all the scrap brass I found that day but did get this picture someone took of a signet ring I found. Almost looks like some kind of bird (or Thunderbird?) of some sorts. Any ideas anyone? It's not a beach, but still fun to detect.

Oh..... you should try that. I would be curious if it actually did mask the good target if there was one. If it hears the good target, maybe that glitch is what we have been praying for, in not responding to iron but hearing something good under or near it. 😄 You never know.

I rotated that copper to maybe show a head. Also the small circled area almost looks like an number or letter.

I tried mine on an open lot. We were looking for musket balls and large iron case shot. It did fairly well on the deeper iron. No issues with the soil but we were on the coast, so it is a mix of dirt and sand. I would think that the machine is set to salt and it may not like other types of soil. I'm not sure how it would handle basalt or fertilized farm fields??

Sell them for 10K a piece! 😄

Nice looking Large cent. Perfect combination of patina and remaining dirt to give it some nice contrast and an aged look. I wish all old coins were in that nice, readable shape.

Yep....... Actually, I shouldn't even count any of the war nickels since the contain so little silver. 😄 But it did come from that beach. I'm finishing up the clad and putting it away with the rest of the previous years clad. I bet a lot of people leave war nickels with their clad. Sometimes it's hard to tell you have one because they are green like regular nickels, other times they are clean as can be.

So I started to tumble the clad that I found for the season mostly to clean up the Buffalo nickels and this turned up? 284 nickels tumbled and one of them ended up being a 1943 War nickel. ❤️

Yep. I got skunked. I'm hoping I get skunked again next year too 😍 😄 Thanks Jim. I had to fire the guy that was seeding my silver for me 😄 Unreliable he was. Seriously, somehow there was enough sand removed to reveal a lot more coins than I imagined were there. I'm hoping it continues because it's a long beach and if other areas open up like that, then high coin counts can be expected. Hopefully some gold as well. If you want to get out and hunt some beaches off season together, I can hunt the dry while you hunt the water. That way if the sharks get you I can pull you out! 😉

I wish the GPX was waterproof. I would love to see how it handled at a target free beach like that. Minus the sharks of course😬

So here are the silver totals for the year and for 3 seasons from this one beach. Clad pictured is only from this season. For people new to the hobby, try and never think something is hunted out. Eventually it may end up that way, but don't limit yourself to that thinking. I would have never guessed there is this much left at a beach. It's true that the shallow stuff gets hunted out rather quickly by regular hunters, but there are areas and depths that are still original. The color of the coins tell me these are not recent drops and that they have been there from about the 40's thru the 80's. Who knows, once I clean all that clad in the tumbler, I may pick up a stray War nickel in the bunch. 😁