Friday, February 26, 2016

2/26/16 Report - 11,000 Year Old Pendant Found. Button For ID. When to Grid.


Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com


"Silver" Button For ID.
Find and photo by Tom G. from Delaware.
Front of Same Button.



This button was found by Tom G. in Dover Delaware.  If you can provide any ideas about possible age or identity, please let me know.

I also received pictures of a very old cannon to identify.  I hope to be able to post that soon.

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Here is something really interesting.

"An 11,000 year old engraved shale pendant discovered by archaeologists during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire is unique in the UK, according to new research."
Here is the link for the rest of that article.


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Gridding can be useful in some situations, however it can be a big waste of time in other situations.

Gridding, to be done well, is done in a very tight pattern.  When gridding is appropriate, the boundaries of the area should be defined and marked, and you should be able to see or keep track of the areas you have already covered well.

There is simply too much area on a beach to cover an entire beach.  A team of detectorists might choose to grid a section of a beach.

Gridding is more appropriate when the area to be covered is small and well defined, such as at an old home site.

On a beach, there will be different areas.  Some of them will be much more promising than other areas.  If you decide to grid, you will want to spend your time only on those areas that are the most promising.

So how do you find the best areas?  One is by recognizing the signs when you look at a beach. Another way is by knowing the history of the beach.  And another way is by sampling.

Signs you might want to look for can include things like dips or cuts.

Other things to look for include high traffic areas, such as walkways, beach chairs, or vendor booths.

High traffic by itself is not the only factor.  Not all traffic is the same.  Generally speaking, the more active the population, the better.  Activities such as parasailing, jet skiing or volleyball can cause  lot of losses, so look for areas where people are not only present but also active, especially in the water.

I do a lot of sampling.  Even the busiest areas can be cleaned out on a daily basis, or even more often than that.  Before committing the time to run a serious grid pattern anywhere, I want to know that there is some reason to spend a lot of good time at that location.  To test an area, I will run a loose pattern of some sort to see it it looks promising at all.

There are times when you might want to go after a high value target in an area where there really isn't much else to be found.  If there is the possibility of a very high value target, there are times when it could pay to grid the area thoroughly even if there aren't any other targets.

I discussed basic metal detector math in a post back some time ago.  One high value target can be worth thousands of low value targets.  If have good reason to believe there might be a high value target in the area, it doesn't really matter if there is nothing else to be found there.

My main point is that before deciding to grid an area, especially on a beach, I need a good reason to spend my time gridding that area instead of spending my time somewhere else.

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On the Treasure Coast the wind is turning into a north wind, however we'll have a couple of days of very smooth surf.

Happy hunting
TreasureGuide@comcast.net