Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
An amateur archaeologist recently discovered a lost Spanish settlement in the Florida Panhandle. |
| Same Find After Cleaning |
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| Treasure Coast Beach Find. |
Here is a find that sat around for a while before I did anything with it.
Before I cleaned it I thought it might be a silver heart.
I had just finished cleaning another object and had a muriatic bath ready to go so I decided to put the object in. I was just assuming that it was silver,
In a very short time it was clean. It didn't take long at all.
It turns out it wasn't silver. It was copper.
I don't think it is a heart now either, but maybe. It appears that there was a hole or chain or something, which broke through.
There is some gold gilt left on it.
It is a little more interesting to me now. I was wrong about the metal, for sure. And now I really don't know what it is.
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According to experts, Garner’s find at a newly cleared lot along the Pensacola Bay was the landing site of a doomed 1559 expedition led by Tristan de Luna. The discovery bolsters Pensacola’s claim as the first European settlement in the modern-day United States, six years before Pedro Menendez founded St. Augustine on Florida’s Atlantic coast. The Luna expedition was scuttled by a hurricane that sank five ships in September 1559, shortly after the fleet arrived.
Click here for the rest of that story.
Thanks to Dean R. for the link.
Amateur archaeologists make many important finds. They are out there in the field, are interested and informed. Empowering and informing the public will lead to even more discoveries.
If you look at Allan Craig's books about the coins in the Florida Collection or the Marken book on pottery from Spanish shipwrecks (both printed by the University of Florida Press), you'll see how much treasure hunters have contributed. Both of those studies make extensive use of items found by treasure hunters. In the preface Marken spends a lot of time apologizing for the fact that his study considered objects found by treasure hunters, but without them the record would be much less complete.
Books published by university presses are expensive. And either of the books mentioned above will cost you over $50 for used copies. That is too bad. The oft stated purpose is to save history for the public, yet the information is not inexpensively available.
Those types of books will mostly be purchased by research libraries and accessed by academics and graduate students. There is not a large market for such books, and that is part of the reason they cost so much.
In my opinion the information in those books should be inexpensively and easily available to the public. The public pays for most of the research activities anyhow, and in more than one way. And the state universities are supported by the public.
If you do not want or cannot afford your own copy, you can get free access to them through a library. Don't be afraid to ask your librarian for an interlibrary loan if they do not keep a copy on hand.
Also remember that you can see part of those books online for free.
While a lot of people are calling for income equality these days, I am as interested in information access equality.
The internet has increased access to information for the public, but there are limits.
I've recently reported how archaeologists intentionally keep site information from the public who funds most of the activities either directly or indirectly.
The academic and scientific communities publish much of the time in very expensive scientific journals. If you don't have a good research library nearby or if your local librarian won't assist. you might not be able to easily access that information.
I've mentioned the Open Access Movement before, so won't go into that now, but to me that is an important movement.
As I said, there isn't a large market for books like the two I mentioned above, so they are expensive. That is simple economics. There are a variety of possible solutions though.
In these days when income inequality receives so much attention, I would like to bring attention to the issue of information access inequality.
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| Piece of Black Glass |
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| Same Piece of Glass Held Up To a Light. |
This piece of black glass was found on the Treasure Coast, but turned out to be brown instead of dark green. You can see what it looked like when held up to a light (below).
That was a little bit of a surprise to me. Most of the black glass I've found was a dark olive green.
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On the Treasure Coast we're going to have three or four days of 3 - 5 foot surf. That is not bad, however the wind will be mostly a south wind.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
