Sunday, July 14, 2019

7/14/.19 Report - 17th Century Shipwreck With Gold Coins, Diamond Ring and CHEESE. Old Plated and Gilt Buttons. Barry.


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

Source: See TheLocal.se link below.


Of the gold coins, diamond ring and cheese salvaged from a 17th century shipwreck, it seems the cheese received the most attention, perhaps because it was somewhat unusual or said more about daily life on board the ship.


Divers excavating the royal ship Kronan in the waters off the Baltic Sea island of Ă–land came upon the smelly material inside a black tin jar found on the seabed this month.


"It's a pretty good guess that it's some kind of dairy product, and we think it is cheese," researcher Lars Einarsson at the Kalmar County Museum told The Local on Wednesday.


"It looks a bit like some kind of granular Roquefort cheese. It's been in the mud, so it's reasonably well preserved, but at the same time it has been at the bottom of the sea for 340 years – we're not talking Tutankhamun's burial chamber," he said.


Einarsson said the thick, gooey find smells strongly of cheese and yeast.


"I think it smells quite nice, because I like exotic food. But I would not want to taste it."

He and his team presented the suspected cheese on Tuesday along with some of the other items salvaged during the two-week diving project in July – including 14 gold coins and a diamond ring...

Here is the link.


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Yesterday I posted the following button for ID.


Mitch King identified it as a modern blazer button.  That is what I get for dumping a bunch of buttons together and not doing the research or labeling them.  Actually I couldn't have planned it better, because it goes along perfectly with what I wanted to discuss today.

Yesterday I talked about putting the puzzle together.  I was talking about the evidence that remains on a site that when put together gives a nice picture of what happened at a ;particular time and place in history.  My example was a land site where there were was still a lot of evidence of that time in history.

The beach is different.  Instead of finding many pieces of the puzzle in context, on a beach it is more like you took puzzle random pieces from a lot of different puzzles, threw them altogether, and churned them continually for years.  You might occasionally get a few things that go together, but things from different times, and even different places, can be mixed in.  In the dunes, things are as randomly mixed, and in the deeper water things aren't as completely mixed.  And if you get down to deeper layers of sand, things haven't been disturbed as much, but if you are talking about that area near the water line where there is almost continual movement, old things can show up once in a while, but things from more recent times can show up as well.  You can't tell much about the age of the item from its context, because the context has not been preserved in that great mixing bowl.  You can find things that differ in age from millions old to things that were lost just yesterday in the same place.  Furthermore, the items can move north or south on the beach, not just up and down or in and out.  They can also come from farther out in the water or down from the dunes.

When you are getting multiple items, sometimes you can actually trace them to try to determine where they are coming from.  I've found, for example, lead shot on the beach and also on slabs falling down the dune face.  That convinced me that at least some of them were coming from the dunes.  Other times you might be able to trace them down into the water, but it is often not easy to figure out where they came from, especially when they come from that very dynamic zone where sand and other things move almost continually.

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Here are some old dug buttons without much identifying information other than the back marks, yet there are some clues.


Near 3/4 Inch Domed Button That Reads PLATED.

Below is a flat button that reads STANDARD COLOUR RICH.  I can't make out the other marks.


Reads: STANDARD COLOUR RICH

I assume that one is British because of the spelling of color.


And below is a coat button.  I assume that because of the large, over one inch, size.


Flat Coat Button.

I was going to post the front and backs of each of these and some other buttons, but when I started to do it I realized I had some of the photos labeled wrong.  Maybe I'll straighten out that some other time.

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Source: nhc.noaa.gov

As you can see, Barry has move north.  The other system that was in the Atlantic has disappeared.

Watch for more of those though.  Once it starts there are usually several systems coming off of Africa.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net