2/4/20 Report - Monitoring Cleaning of Silver Reale. Beach Conditions: Short Term and Long Term.

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

Four Reale After Cleaning and A Little Polishing.

I've been showing the progress as I clean a recently found four-reale.  I showed a few photos of that previously, including how it looked when it was found and how it looked after a little cleaning.

I cleaned that cob some more, and you can see above how it looks now.  I'm done with the Muriatic acid.  The encrustation has been removed, and I did just a little shining with a baking soda paste.

The details can be seen much better now.  I'm pretty sure that it is a Phillip V and dates to between 1700 and 1715.

Below is a close-up like the one I showed just a few days ago when I was not done with the cleaning.  If you compare this photo with the one I posted the other day, you'll see how much of the encrustation and foreign particles have  been removed by soaking in Muriatic acid.  You can also see how the high areas that have been shined actually look like silver now.

Close-up View of Part of the Same Four-Reale.

I also stumbled onto something else that might be helpful.  If you want to get a better look at the design before you are done cleaning it, you can use some wet baking soda spread thinly across the surface of the cob to bring out the design, as shown below.

Same Four-Reale With Baking

Soda Bringing Out the Detail.

With just the naked eye I could see the details of the design probably better than I could see it with magnification but without the contrasting white substance.  I was really surprised by how much it helped.  I took the above photo with a regular digital camera.  I probably should have used magnification so you could see the effect even better.

---

Steve and Paulette M. sent the following email and photos take yesterday (2/3) and commented on Bonsteel where the cliff in front of the dunes is about six feet high.  Below is the photo and email.

Bonsteel Park 2/3
Photo by Steve and Paulette M.

Today we were looking at different beach accesses north of Fort Pierce and we started at Indialantic and went South to Turtle trails.  Not much good looking erosion anywhere.  We went to Bonsteel knowing 3 weeks ago they dumped sand and bulldozed it a quarter mile north and south about 6 feet thick.  Today it was just about all gone.  Just a thin slice at the dune.  Beach was wider, but not too much. Steve and Paulette M.

Bonsteel Park 2/3
Photo by Steve and Paulette M.

Thanks Steve and Paulette.

---

Yesterday I posted a link to an article that discussed a method of monitoring long term beach trends of accretion and erosion.  You'll find that it provides some interesting clues.

Long term trends are obviously important to the treasure hunter.  A beach that has been building for decades will have a lot of sand covering up many of the kinds of things you would most be ooking for.  It can take a lot more to uncover treasure at a beach that has a lot of accumulated sand.

A beach that has generally been eroding over the years and decades, on the other hand, will give you a much better chance.  Although it will vary one way and then the other on a shorter term basis, it won't take as much to uncover the old stuff.

One Treasure Coast beach that was very productive back in the 80s and 90s has been much less productive in the past few years due primarily to frequent renourishment programs to the north and littoral drift.

The sand dumped by renourishment projects will generally eroded much faster than sand that has naturally accumulated.  For one thing it is out of place.  No matter how many hundreds of yards is renourished, it will normally be bordered by areas were the sand has been depleted.  That makes the renourished areas more vulnerable.

No matter how often they dump sand at places like the beach south of the jetty at Fort Pierce, it will erode very quickly because of the interruption of sand caused by the inlet and jetty.

If a beach has been generally eroding over a period of time, new sand dumped on the area will not normally last long very long, but has a slightly better chance if it is dumped during the spring or summer when at least the short term trend is more favorable.  Of course a strong storm could change all of that.

One thing to keep track of is the long term trend of the beach.  Has it been eroding, building or staying about the same?  The bottom line is that a beach that has been eroding over the years will tend to become productive more easily and frequently than one that has been building over a long period of time.

---

The surf is small and the tides are small.  In a few days the surf is predicted to increase up to 2 or 3 feet, but that isn't very much either.

Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net

2/19/17 Report - Theories About the Cobs of Bonsteel Park Beach. The Democratization of Archaeology and Our Cultural Heritage.

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

I recently mentioned Bonsteel Park.  The beach in that area produces cobs, including a lot of half reales, when the water hits the dunes.   No wreck has been found near that beach to account for the cobs.

There are different ideas about how the cobs ended up there.  Frogfoot Weller, for example, suggested that the old Chuck's Steakhouse was the site of the wreck of Ubilla's frigate.  Yet, I don't know of any ballast pile in that area.

Others believed that  a smaller vessel associated with the early Spanish salvage efforts wrecked there.

And still other's believe that individual's that left the salvage camp on their way to St. Augustine buried treasure there or met some unfortunate event.

One of the most interesting things to me is the predominance of half reales, which is not unlike some other beaches which are adjacent to known wreck sites.  As I've said before, I have some ideas about why more half reales are found on some beaches while more larger denomination cobs are found in the water on the associated wreck sites.  

---

Where do you look when you want to learn about Florida's history?  If you want to learn more about an artifact, where do you look or who do you ask?

I know that most people these days do a good bit of online research.  That has increased dramatically over the past several years.  When I began this blog there were not nearly as many blogs and web sites about metal detecting, archaeology and local history as there are today.  In making more information more easily available to more people, the internet has been democratizing knowledge.

Wikipedia says, "The democratization of knowledge is the acquisition and spread of knowledge amongst the common people, not just privileged elites such as clergy and academics. Libraries—public libraries in particular—and modern digital technology such as the internet—play a key role in the democratization of knowledge, as they provide open access of information to the masses."

Back in  2013 I conducted a blog poll to find out how people learn more about the Treasures of the Treasure Coast.  117 people responded to the poll.  They were people who visit my blog and therefore can be assumed to be more interested than the general population in metal detecting and treasure hunting.

Only 5% of the respondents said they had ever seen any of the coins in the Florida Collection. I don't know what percent of the population in general have seen the coins in the Florida collection, but I would assume that it would be a much smaller percent of the total population.  Among the people that read this blog are some who have found coins that went into the collection.  Anyone who reads this blog has seen pictures of coins that went into the Florida Collection before those coins became a part of the collection.   Not only did they see pictures but they also read something about the coins, how the coins were found and the people that found them.

One of my points today might be an obvious point, but I think it needs to be stressed.  Technology has provided increased access to more and better information about history, archaeology and our cultural heritage.  Every year more people read and discuss and get information about our cultural heritage over the internet.

If you want to study coins from the 1715 Fleet, for example, or any other shipwreck for that matter, where do you go?  The internet more likely than not.  You will find pictures and information in online auction catalogs, on web sites, blogs, ebooks,  and online documents such as dissertations, academic papers and archaeological reports.  The web provides a lot of information that is free and easily available to the public.

The people who contribute to those online resources include many amateurs as well as professionals.  In a simple blog like this one you often see pictures and information contributed by those who actually salvage the items that make up our museum collections.  You see the contents of famous collections as they change hands in online auctions.  You get information from people who make finds in the field and write books, and post their information on the internet.

There are amateurs outside of the state agencies and universities that contribute very significant discoveries, and there are researchers such as Laura Strolia who have contributed top notch research through blogs like this one.  Salvage companies like the Mel Fisher group and Odyssey Marine, not only find shipwrecks and artifacts, but also operate museums and display collections and publish quality research papers.

Archaeology, like other fields, is without a doubt being democratized, yet those of the elite have much to protect.  They feel their jobs, careers, status and reason for being are threatened by democratization of our cultural heritage.  Instead of keeping up, they drag their feet and in the process widen the gap between themselves and the public that funds them.  Their existence is threatened, but the threat is not what they think it is.  Their biggest threat is their own efforts to protect their domain while progress moves on.

---

The surf is still small.  We'll have a one or two foot surf Monday, and after that a little increase.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net