Tuesday, July 23, 2019

7/23/19 Report - Tropical Depression Three. Eagle Badge. Roman Fish. Epistemology and Identifying Artifacts.


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

Tropical Depression Three
Source: nhc.noaa.gov

It's that time of year when the Atlantic gets active and you have to be ready and alert.  Make sure your batteries are charged and your equipment is in good repair.

In the last couple of days, Tropical Depression Three formed just off the coast of Florida.  The projected path was north along the coast, but it has already fallen apart.

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Here is a find for ID.  It is about one and three sixteenths high and wide.  I'd say it is a hat badge (maybe WW II) but it is smaller than others I've found.

It should be easy enough to ID.  I just haven't taken the time to check it our yet.  Maybe someone can do it for me.

Thanks.

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Here is a good article illustrating the difficulty of artifact identification.

Source: See TheGuardian.com link below.
A fragment from a Roman bottle so exceptionally rare that it has taken glass experts from around the world two years to conclusively identify it has been discovered thousands of miles from where it was made.

The discovery at Checkworth Roman Villa  in Gloucestershire of the small shard of patterned green glass, part of an 1,800-year-old fish bottle, has astonished archaeologists...

The distinctive profile of the glass indicated it came from a long bottle with an oval shape and a sharp taper at the end. Price eventually found it matched a restored fish-shaped bottle in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York.

In an indication of its rarity, the only other example of a Roman fish bottle comes from a 2AD burial at Chersonesus in Crimea...
Here is the link for more about that.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/22/mystery-of-chedworth-1800-year-old-roman-glass-shard-solved

So will it now be repatriated?

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The main subject of this blog for me, you might be surprised to learn, is epistemology.  It is the subtext of so much of what I post.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.  Put more simply, and in the words sung by award winning Amy Adams in the movie Enchanted, it attempts to answer the question, "How do you know."

Whether you are attempting to determine where you will find things on a beach or what some dug object such as the Roman glass artifact really is, there is a process, and that process is very interesting and important to me.  The question you might ask about any belief, natural or spiritual, is "How do you know?" You should have an answer for that question, whether it satisfies anybody else or not.

Much of the time, consensus is what people are looking for.  If most people agree, or if the experts agree, then it is accepted, but there are many times when the general view has been wrong and there have been many times when the experts were wrong.  If you look at why they were wrong, you can learn a lot from that.  What types of mistakes did they make?

The article about the Roman fish bottle is a good example.  They went through a process.  They started out, like we all do at times, not having a clue, then doing the research and eventually coming to a conclusion.

Recently I've talked several times about how difficult it can be to determine the age and identify of items.   In this case, the top experts with all their resources took years to identify a single artifact.  They were lucky they found an exact match.  That doesn't always happen.

The professionals make assumptions too - sometimes more than other people.  They accept the dogma of their professional community.  It is required to a large extent.

How did they identify the Roman fish artifact?  They found an artifact that matched their piece.  How convincing is that?  Could they be wrong?  How and why?

In the near future I plan to talk about the factors that we can use to identify the age of an dug artifact. In fact, I was going to start that today, but at the last minute decided to provide this background first.  That was partly because I ran across the article about the Roman fish.

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Lightning on Clearwater Beach recently killed and injured people.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-lightning-strike-beach-8-injured

Be careful.

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Let me know what you think of the eagle pin/badge.

Happy hunting
TreasureGuide@comcast.net