Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Mystery Object. |
This is about the size of a quarter and made of a light metal such as aluminum. I don't know what it is and would appreciate any ideas or information you might be able to provide. I think it might be a token, but can't find any remaining design on it. Could be just a washer or something, but I'm leaning more towards token.
That is a triangular hole in the middle.
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In the 1920s, archaeologists dug up a trove of ancient artifacts near Clovis, New Mexico. What humans had known about their past was changed forever. These artifacts were the oldest man-made objects found on the Western Hemisphere, and the discovery led to a theory that the first humans to set foot in the Americas did so around about 13,000 years ago, and that they made and used tools like the ones found near Clovis.
Now a group of archaeologists from Texas State University are offering some of the most convincing evidence yet to challenge this “Clovis First” theory. They’ve recently discovered about 150,000 artifacts near at the Gault Archaeological Site near Killeen, Texas. What they’ve found could change what we know about the timeline of human history...
Here is the link for more about that.
http://www.texasstandard.org/stories/archaeologists-say-humans-may-have-come-to-texas-earlier-than-previously-thought/
I never trusted archaeological dating techniques too much anyhow.
Just a reminder - arrow heads and other stone or shell artifacts occasionally show up on Treasure Coast beaches. I've shown a few in the past.
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I once talked to a guy at the beach who was using a very high end gold detector. He told me that the detector detected deeper when he walked along the beach north/south than when he walked in and out from the water. He said he thought it had something to do with the magnetic fields. He was observing something real, but it had nothing to do with the earth's magnetic fields.
On another occasion a guy using an Excalibur saw me using an Excalibur detector in the wet sand and shallow moving wate and asked to see what settings I was using. A lot of people don't know how to detect in the wet sand. This fellow was undoubtedly using discrimination mode and getting false signals when he was in the wet sand area.
I was using what I almost always used when detecting the beach with my Excalibur. I used maximum sensitivity and pinpoint rather than discrimination mode.
What the first man was missing was the fact that as the salt water covers and recedes from the beach, it creates bands of mineralization. Most of the dry beach in Florida has almost no mineralization, except where you have black sand. But the ocean is salt water and the water and wet sand is mineralized.
When you are in the wet sand area, you have bands of mineralization. The detector has to adjust to the different levels of mineralization. If you are walking along the waterline, when you swing the coil, your coil crosses those bands of mineralization. As your detector attempts to adjust, you will lose some sensitivity. It can also cause false signals.
If you walk in and out from the water, your sweeps are not crossing the bands of changing mineralization so much. You are sweeping with the bands instead of across them. Therefore your detector does not have to adjust to so many changes. That reduces false signals caused by changes in mineralization and gives what appears to be an increase in sensitivity and depth of detecting.
There are a variety of methods for dealing with the changing mineralization in the wet sand zone. One is to decrease your detectors sensitivity. Another is to increase discrimination. And another is to ground balance your detector to the salt water, if your detector has that capability.
Decreasing sensitivity or increasing discrimination can both have negative effects. You don't want to do either of those any more than necessary. You have to weigh the positive and negatives of each method. Your choice will be in part determined by the type of detector you use.
Another approach is to use all metals or pinpoint mode. That is what I did more than anything else.
In pinpoint or all-metals mode you can hear the changes in mineralization, especially at the line where the most recent water stopped, however you can learn to tell the difference between the sound caused by mineralization and a real target - most of the time. If a target is deep or real small, it is more difficult, so you might lose some borderline targets that way, but not much, and you'll do better than with most other approaches.
With a detector like the ATX you can ground balance out the salt water mineralization and do very well. Still, if you want every last bit of depth, use non-motion mode. You'll hear some of the salt mineralization, but you'll still get that last bit of sensitivity to deep and small targets. Non-motion mode in wet sand takes a bit of practice, but it works well once you master it.
I sometimes test and compare the different modes or approaches. Go over an area with one mode and take out all targets and then use the other mode. I've done that enough that I know how the different modes compare. Of course you have to master each mode in order to make good comparisons.
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There is no significant weather in the Atlantic right now. We still have a two to three foot surf and moderate tides.
