8/26/17 Report - Intertwined Rings and Mixing of Old and New Metal Detecting Targets.

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

Gold Intertwined Rings Found by John C.
Photo by John C.

Yesterday I was discussing a couple silver intertwined rings that were found by John C. along with some cobs on a shipwreck beach.  He also sent the above picture showing gold intertwined ring finds. The ring on the right is marked Cartier, which didn't have a U. S. office until 1909.

I'm afraid I made no progress in determining the age or source of the silver rings shown yesterday, although I did find that such rings have been used long enough that they could be of such an early date.  I also mentioned the extreme rarity of silver rings found by divers on 1715 Fleet shipwreck sites.

The difficulty of determining the age of unmarked items on a beach should be no surprise.  That is exactly why archaeology can not be conducted on a beach.

A beach is a dynamic environment.  Nothing stays in place.  Things get mixed together - even things from different centuries.  The same thing applies to shallow water sites.

There are a variety of ways that items from different time periods can get mixed together.  I'll try to describe one of those ways today.

Things lost in the dunes get buried as the dunes sand blows back and the dunes build.  Older things will naturally be deeper.  In the illustration above, the three colored lines represent layers from three different time periods that can be decades or even centuries apart.

Three Layers of Old Items In Dune Eroded Down to Beach Level.

When the dune face erodes, the items from various layers and age periods fall to the level of the beach, where they are then shuffled around when the waves come up to the bottom of the dunes. Items from different time periods get mixed together.

Something similar happens on the beach slope, but to a lesser extent because the beach slope gets stirred more often.  Still, when the beach gets cut, older items are mixed together with newer items, including those that were recently dropped.  The age range of items deposited in the mixture will probably not be as large as the various ages represented in the layers of the dunes.

Once the items of various ages get mixed together, the water distributes them primarily by shape and density.

Silver rings on a salt water beach corrode. That could make any markings difficult or impossible to find.  And silver was not always marked.  Silversmith in England and France began stamping sterling silver objects in the 14th century, but there was no requirement for marking silver in the United States until 1906.  That leaves a large gap of 191 years between 1715 and 1906.

The number and variety of older silver rings found on the beaches is huge.  I'm left with a lot of unanswered questions and my recent investigations have not answered any of them.  I am a little more informed though, and I hope you are too.

I wonder if large number of silver rings might have been used at some time as trade goods or might have something to do with later salvage efforts, either large scale or undocumented small scale efforts.

It is my opinion that a lot of the silver ring finds, even some that look quite old, are 20th century.  Are there exceptions?  Definitely!  But it seems difficult or impossible to identify the date of many of the examples we see with the information available.

There are other related questions that I'll discuss in future posts.

Couple Intertwined Rings Found by Author.

I wanted to go back and find a particular example - a triple ring composed of gold, silver and another metal - I think platinum.  I didn't find that one right off, but ran across the two examples shown above while looking.  The one on the left has three intertwined rings and the one on the right, five.

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I'm hoping that everyone will respond to the blog poll.

On the Treasure Coast we're going to have one and two foot surf for a week or so.  I'll be watching our low pressure area for any developments.

As you undoubtedly know, Harvey hit Texas hard.  It could go back out into the Gulf again.

You can check out the live webcam from Galveston.

Here is the link.

http://www.galveston.com/seawallvideocam/

Thanks to GoSports for that one.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net