Sunday, July 28, 2019

7/28/19 Report - 200 Pounds of Found Ancient Coins. Space Debris. Finger Rings From Spanish Colonial Sites: Some Generalities.


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

Source: See Vietnamplus link below.

Over two-hundred pounds of ancient coins (some shown above) were found and confiscated by police.  They date back to 118 BC, but also included coins made between 621 and 1233.

Here is the link.

https://en.vietnamplus.vn/over-100kg-of-ancient-coins-discovered-in-yen-bai/156763.vnp

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Jim F. found the above item and sent the following email.

Hi TG.

Was out detecting the beach up here in Cocoa a few days ago and got a whopping coin signal on the beach. Came up a 12-45, 12-47 on my Minelab E-Trac and was a good repeatable target...the kind you always dig no matter what. I was surprised when what came up was a very light piece of metal about 3-inches square, with some flush aerospace-type rivets installed along one side and melted carbon fiber on the back. A rather jagged piece of what I think is a piece of Aluminum-Lithium aeroshell from a Space-X Falcon 9 spacecraft. The ship was aborted in 2015 at 200,000 feet running a bit over Mach 2. Hundreds of thousands of pieces were blown to the four winds almost directly over Cape Canaveral. I've found bent and twisted fragments of Berylium Copper (used in rocket engine plumbing and cooling) when the tide is right. Not long ago the beach was "re-nourished" with tons of offshore sand, and I think this may have come from deeper waters. Never know what you are going to find at the beach. I think a lot of people would have thrown this away, not knowing what it really is.Like you always say, don't toss something away until you are really sure what it is! I found the clad nickle used for scale purposed not far from it...convenient.

Cheers!

Thanks Jim.  Nice find!

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Earlier this year I mentioned the Orlando KellyCo store closing.  I just got a KellyCo brochure in the mail.  It seems they are now located in Knoxville TN.



You can find them online.

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I've mentioned this before, but I often receive photos of old silver rings and people wonder if they might be from a shipwreck.  As I've said more than once, one of the very top long-time treasure salvage guys said that a silver rings have not been found on 1715 Fleet wreck sites.  Gold rings are not unusual from the same wrecks, as you undoubtedly know.

Silver rings have been found in good numbers on 18th century Spanish colonial archaeological sites though.  The lack of silver rings on the wrecks seems very strange to me.  Why would silver rings be fairly common from 18th century Spanish colonial sites, but not found on the 1715 Fleet wrecks?  I have a few theories, but get into my theories now.

I was looking at Kathleen Deagan's book, Artifacts of the Spanish Colonial Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500 - 1800, Volume 2, and wanted to post some interesting statements about jewelry from Spanish colonial archaeological sites.  Here it is.

Apart from glass beads, finger rings are the most frequently reported jewelry items on Spanish Colonial sites.  Simple bands of glass, jet, or metal (anillos) and rings with settings (sortijas) are present throughout the colonial period.  Precious finger rings of the sixteenth century were carefully sculpted and enameled, with high, decorated box mounts (Bury, 1984:7): however, this was not the case with the early finger rings from archaeological sites, which tend to be quite humble in both design and material.


You might recall that yesterday I mentioned finding a gold enameled ring on a Treasure Coast beach. At the time I didn't think of it possibly being Spanish colonial and didn't pay much attention to it.

Deagan also mentions that the earlier rings from Spanish colonial sites were humble in both design and material.  Here is a sample of some of those shown in the Deagan book.

Source: Deagan book cited above.

That isn't the best picture, but I think you can tell that they are rings are not really very different from many inexpensive rings that you might find from later centuries.   If you would find one on a beach, you might not think much of it.  There is very little to suggest that those rings are centuries old.

Here is one of many that I could have selected that isn't very different from those shown above.  In fact it is similar to the one on the extreme right in the photo above.  (I know you can't see that photo very well.  Sorry about that.)

Silver Turquoise Ring.
The turquoise is discolored (I mentioned something about how that can happen yesterday.).  In this case the discoloration is due partly to patina.

But this ring provides some good information if you look inside.  You can clearly read the "STERLING" mark.

At first glance I would take this ring as possibly being from the 1970s, but it is really not very different in appearance from rings made centuries ago.

I might be able to make out the other mark if I do some cleaning.

Sterling Mark on Ring Shown Above.

On the other hand, the very corroded silver band shown below shows no markings at all.  That could be due to the corrosion, but maybe it never had any markings.

Corroded Silver Ring With No Identifiable Marks Found on Treasure Coast.

I'll have more examples related to this topic in the future.

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Source: nhc.noaa.gov

We now have one system with a 10% chance of becoming a cyclone in the next 48 hours.

The surf is still running one to two feet on the Treasure Coast.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net