Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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| Dug Columbian Coin Showing a Lady - Not Liberty. |
I've been talking about coins showing Lady Liberty. Here is a coin showing a lady with a very different look. She appears to be bound. She is not Lady Liberty. She is known as Policarpa Salavarrieta.
From Wikipedia:
Policarpa Salavarrieta, also known as "La Pola," was a Neogranadine seamstress who spied for the Revolutionary Forces during the Spanish Reconquista of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. She was captured by Spanish Royalists and ultimately executed for high treason. The Day of the Colombian Woman is on "her" day. She is now considered a heroine of the independence of Colombia.
Coins often portray historical figures. Sometimes they are presidents or other admired or respected people. The image is not only meant to portray and honor the person, but also to convey a message and inspire people. Even when the image is of a actual person, there are often myths that come to surround the person.
One story that you might have heard is that George Washington, as a young man, threw a silver dollar across the Potomac. The story is meant to illustrate his strength, but is it true. There is some disagreement on that. Here is what one web site says.
But alas, his famous coin toss is apparently not the whole truth. This popular myth is often told to illustrate his strength, but the river was not the Potomac (about a mile wide) nor was it the Delaware. Looking at his childhood homestead, perhaps it was the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia. According to myth, Washington threw a piece of slate, about the size and shape of a dollar, not a actual silver dollar. This account took place according to Martha Washington's grandson, George Washington Parke Custis. While the story has never been verified, historians concede that the feat is a possibility. At the site of the Washington family homestead, the Rappahannock measures only 250 feet across, an impressive but not impossible throwing distance.
Moreover, there were no US silver dollars available when Washington was a young man.
Source:
https://www.ngccoin.com/boards/topic/123308-did-george-washington-really-throw-a-silver-dollar-across-the-potomac-river/
Whether he actually threw a coin (silver dollar or not) across a specific river is not really the point, I guess, but you should realize that representations are not always literally true and that myths are often added to the image of historical people and events.
I'll have more to say about that in the near future as it relates to treasure hunting. I also plan to talk about the psychology of meaning and how to interpret signs and symbols.
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Just because a technology is available doesn't mean it should be used or that it will be used correctly. New technologies can seem promising, but if you don't use it well, it won't do you much good.
Ground penetrating radar has been around a while now. In fact it was invented in the 1920s, but it wasn't used much until the 1970s when the military began exploring its use for finding mines, buried weapons, tunnels etc. In recent years it has been used more frequently by archaeologists and treasure hunters.
The selection of the best technology for the job depends upon a variety of factors. Using a golf analogy, there are times when you would chose a putter and times when you would use a driver.
On one TV show (Oak Island) the EM61 metal detector was used on a strip of rocky land. There seemed to be no strategy other than seeing what might be found. Maybe they didn't know if the system might be useful and just wanted to explore using it a little. If that was the case I can understand it to some extent. But what was strange to me, was that after the EM61 "got a hit" then the CTX 3030 was used to detect the target before retrieval. In each case that they showed, the target detected by the EM61 was also detected by the metal detector. Again, that doesn't make much sense to me unless you are simply trying to find out how the EM61 works or how to use it. I already talked about this to some extent in a previous post.
NOTE: I originally referred to the EM61 as a GPR system. I am told that it is actually a metal detector, so I corrected the references in the above paragraph. Thanks to Jorge Y. for pointing out that mistake.
Here is a link for information about the EM61.
http://www.geonics.com/html/em61-mk2.html
On the other TV program, a GPR system detected a very large area of disturbed earth, where it appeared there might have been a large object buried or uncovered in the past. After scanning the ground with the GPR and detecting the large area of disturbed earth, the switched to using a Garrett ATX on the same ground. That made no sense to me either.
The fellow using the ATX found what you'd expect to find around a mid 20th century building - some bottle caps, pull-tabs, etc., and eventually a coin. That had nothing to do with the GPR scan. It seemed they ignored the large and deep area of disturbed earth,. I don't really get that strategy either.
Not only did they seem to ignore the area detected by the GPR system, but the ATX was a bad choice for that situation too. Although I am not generally a big fan of a lot of discrimination, for what they seemed to be doing, I would have chosen another type of metal detector.
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To the very short list of clues about Pilate as a historical figure, archaeologists have added one more: a 2,000-year-old copper alloy ring bearing his name.
The ring was discovered in the late 1960s, one of thousands of artifacts found in the excavation of Herodium, an ancient fortress and palace south of Bethlehem, in the West Bank. But it was not until recently that researchers, analyzing those objects with advanced photography, were able to decipher the ring’s inscription.
It reads “of Pilates,” in Greek letters set around a picture of a wine vessel known as a krater, and is said by archaeologists to be only the second artifact from his time ever found with his name. Kraters are a common image in artifacts of that time and place...
The article continues:
Here is the link if you want to read the rest of the article.
There is a good lesson. The authors didn't try to jump to conclusion that the ring was Pilate's simply because his name was inscribed in it. They considered other things and came up with a more reasonable conclusion.
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It looks like the surf will increase a little by the weekend. Not much else going on.
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| Source: MagicSeaWeed.com |
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
