4/5/19 Report - More Thoughts On The Gold Mystery Item. Treasure Beach Ring Find. Tide Coefficient Tip.

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

Corroded Old Silver Ring Treasure Coast Find
Photo and find by Richard W.

It is not uncommon for me to receive a photo of a heavily corroded small silver ring that was found on a  Treasure Coast shipwreck beach.  When found on one of the beaches where old shipwreck coins and items are found, it is natural to wonder if the ring came from a treasure wreck.  After finding the ring shown above, Richard W. sent me the above photo with the following email.

Detected this ring at Golden Sands Beach on March 19 with my Minelab Equinox 800. I took it to the Mel Fisher Treasure Museum and they said it looked “very interesting”. Back home here in Colorado my Jeweler just examined it and she said it’s silver and very old. Also it could have been cast from a mold as opposed to hammered. I detected all the beaches every day from Bonsteel to John Brooks from March 5 thru March 20 and this was the only thing of interest I found except clad coins and lead fishing weights. Met some nice people and had fun at the TCAS Hunt at Wabasso. Hope to be back next year!

It is very difficult to put a date range on these types of rings, but they are obviously old enough to be very heavily corroded, but that can happen in much less than three hundred years.

Without more information or perhaps some kind of inscription or something, I can't say any more than Richard has already been told.

The most experienced treasure diver on the Treasure Coast has said that no silver rings have been found on 1715 Fleet wrecks.  We do, however, know that they have been archaeologically found on land sites of similar age, so it is difficult to ignore the possibility.

I wonder if they might be trade rings. They are generally small and thin and do not show any outstanding design work that would in any way suggest that they belonged to anyone of high status.

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I received a couple more emails on Terry's gold mystery item.  That post received a lot of attention,

Sal G. thought Terry's gold mystery item could have be Incan.  He pointed out the similarity between the gold mystery item and the gold pendants hanging on the Incan funerary mask shown below.

Picture of Incan Funerary Mask
Submitted by Sal G.

\

Closer View of Pendants.
Submitted by Sal G.

Bill K added these thoughts on the mystery object.

...One thing that came to mind when I saw pictures, was that there was a lot of contraband on those old wooden sailing ships and I wouldn't have put it past one of the crew to snitch some, pound it together and punch a hole through it, then tie around his/her neck with a leather strand and try to smuggle it back into Spain. Thus the crude workmanship and punched hole.

Thanks Sal and Bill.

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A lot of my recent posts have been very popular.  I judge by the number of people that read them and also comments I received in emails.

Some topics attract a lot of readers, while other topics do not attract as many readers, they are deeply appreciated by some individuals.

My posts commenting on Oak Island attract more than the average number of readers, and I get nearly universal positive comments about those discussions.  No matter what you think of the show, it gives me examples and illustrations that a lot of people are familiar with and provides a lot of sharp contrasts with my approach.  If you  read what I wrote yesterday and notice how I approach things,, I think you might be able to see some very basic differences.  

Although I don't always know why a particular post gets a lot of readers and others do not, big finds are always popular, as are big changes in beach conditions.  

There are some posts that are read by a huge numbers of people, and i don't know why.  I suspect that they are picked up elsewhere.  One of my all-time most popular posts was the post I published the day after I was interviewed by CNN.  That naturally drove a lot of people to the blog.

On the other hand, there are some posts that I really like that aren't read by many people.  Even though they are read by fewer people, they can be very meaningful to those people that relate to them in some special way, and I get emails telling me so. 

When I started doing this blog I never thought I would have something to talk about everyday, but that hasn't been much of a problem.  In fact right now I have about a hundred pages of content on my mind that might make good posts.  In fact, I keep delaying some items.

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DJ sent the following tip.

... I use the fishing tide tables to scope out future high and low tides that may be good. This site has a handy “Tide Coefficient” that lets you look for a number 90 or higher - they also show the noon phase. You can choose the location - make sure it is for the ocean not river. 

Thanks DJ,

For the next week the surf will be gradually decreasing from the two to three foot range down to about one foot.

The tides will be a bit higher.

Happy hunting,
]TreasureGuide@comcast.net

8/23/18 Report - Big Surprise Found in Conglomerate: Cannon Ball.

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

Cannon Ball Partially Uncovered in Conglomerate.
Find and photo by Fred B.

You know how it is when you get a signal that reads out as iron and it sounds big and deep and you pass it up?  Just junk, you think to yourself.  Or maybe you had iron discriminated out and didn't hear it at all and wonder why your not finding anything. This is the kind of thing you could be missing.

Fred B. dug this conglomerate about three weeks ago.  He is what e said about it.

A very heavy conglomerate that was about 12 inches down at low tide. After driving around with it in the back of my car for a while, I decided to start dissolving the shells and sand with muriatic acid to see what was there. Well did I ever get a shock when a cannon ball started to appear, which just goes to show, you never know what you are going to find in those conglomerates.

Conglomerate As It Was Dug.

And here is the cannon ball after it was completely removed.

Cannon Ball Removed From Conglomerate.

Super find Fred!  Congratulations, and thanks for sharing.

There is still a lot to be found.  This is one fine example.

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On 8/21 I posted a coin and wanted to see what you thought it was.  I'll give you one more day to send me your comments.

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There aren't any storms yet, and there are no big change in beach conditions yet.  

You can see from today's post that if you are willing to work for it, there are still good finds to be made.

Happy hunting,

Treasureguide@comcast.net

8/3/17 Report - Dug Silver and What It Looks Like. Antique and Collectible Keys Web Site.

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

Object Found on Beach.
You might be surprised what it is.

Someone asked what silver coins and objects look like when they come out of the ground.  It isn't easy to answer that because it varies so much depending upon a number of factors.  Generally silver turns a darker grey to black when it has been on a beach for a while, especially if it has been in salt water.  Above is an example of a piece of silver found on a beach.

It is difficult to identify this coin from this view.  It looks something like a corroded silver cob.  Below you can see the other side of the same object.

Other Side of Same Object.

Can you tell what it is now?  It is a silver Roosevelt dime.

From the appearance, you could easily think that it might be something much older.  When you hold the above object, you can't really see the design very well unless you have the right kind of lighting.

Roosevelt dimes were made from 1946 to 1964, so I don't know how long the dime was on the beach, but it can't be more than 71 years, which might sound like a long time to some of you, but it isn't anything like a Spanish cob, which might have been out there for three hundred years.

Here is a new Roosevelt dime.  It is not silver, but you can match up the images.

New Not-Silver Roosevelt Dime

The older silver dimes were 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper.  The newer dimes are a "sandwich" of pure copper inner layer between two outer layers of cupronickle (75% copper, 25% nickel) alloy giving a total composition of 91.67% Cu and 8.33% Ni.

If you look at edge of one of the newer dimes, you can see a strip of copper.

You might remember when I suggested cutting a silver dime in halves or quarters and using the pieces as test objects for reales.  I said if you can detect piece of a silver dime, you can detect a small silver reale.  They are really very much alike.  In fact some reales from Potosi were assayed and found to have about 10 percent copper content like even though they were not supposed to have that much copper content.

Silver can be encrusted or discolored, depending upon where it has been.  It is really difficult to give a single answer saying what silver will look like when it comes out of the ground.  You can, however, with a good amount of experience, learn to identify silver most of the time from just looking at it, no matter how badly corroded it might be.

Like I said above, the appearance of silver will vary depending upon where it was found.  The silver coins I found in a cold water lake in Minnesota were more of a bluish tint, for example.  They did not corrode much at all compared to those found on a salt water beach or around mangroves.  Salt water beaches and acid soil are both very hard on silver.

For the person that asked what dug silver looks like, you'll find many examples if you read back through the old posts.  Some are shown before and after cleaning.  You can also see Spanish reales in various states of cleaning.

I also found that you can almost always tell a silver coin from the sound it makes when you drop it on a ceramic tile.  Try it.

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Hotel keys used to be very common beach finds.  That was before the more modern key cards.  I found gallons of hotel keys.  Some were the nice big ornate brass keys, while others were smaller and had those large plastic tags bearing the name of the hotel and room number.

I found this very useful web site about antique and collectible keys.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/tools-and-hardware/keys

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There is nothing much to watch in the weather right now.  There is one disturbance just coming off of Africa, but it is too early to pay it much attention.

We're in for more one to two foot surf on the Treasure Coast and south winds.   That means hot weather.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

9/7/15 Report - Great Numismatic Study of Dug Pistareens. Tropical Storm Grace Headed This Way. Ring Beach Find.

Witten by the Treasure Guide for the exclusive use of TreasureBeachesReport.blogspot.com.

Found This Morning On A Treasure Coast Beach.

I went to the beach this morning.  Conditions had not changed at all.  I saw a couple of detectorists on the same beach.  One had done a good bit of the beach before I arrived.  The other arrived later.

People were arriving early for the Labor Day holiday.  There were a few distant showers and a little lightning and thunder.

When the holiday crowds are at the beach, they spread out a little farther than normal from the main gathering spots.

I had just switched from motion mode to non-motion mode, just to check it out, and hit the ring.  It sounded much larger.

I think it is a very good idea to be very familiar and practiced with all the modes that your detector offers.  There are times to use each one.

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Yesterday I posted Bernard Romans' statement about pistareens being found along the Treasure Coast beaches after Easterly gales.

The coins Romans referred to were not really pistareens.  Pistareens, as the term is more strictly defined, are Spanish coins minted in the old world. In the 1700s pistareens were commonly used in the American colonies along with a variety of other foreign coinage.  Of course, there was no U. S. currency yet.  It would be natural for Romans to refer to the Spanish cobs found on the beach as being pistareens, since they were commonly used in the colonies and had similar markings.

Pistareen 

Mint Marks.

1. Seville

2. Madrid

3..Segovia

4.Cuenca

I found a super study of dug pistareens recovered in the tobacco raising colonies of
America.  Pistareens found by both relic hunters and archaeolgists are included in the study.  Many of of those included in the study were found in Virginia.

This is definitely THE best study of a large sample of dug coins that I have ever seen.  The study was published in the April 2001 The Colonial Newsletter.  The title of the study is When Cross Pistareens Cut Their Way Through the Tobacco Colonies.  The author is Thomas A. Kays.  I posted the link below.

Here are some of the conclusions describing the typical dug pistareen.


It crossed the Atlantic westward as a 1721 dated pistareen minted by King Philip V at Seville.

The coin was used to make everyday purchases in Colonial America before the Revolution • 

It grades very fine having circulated actively for fifteen years and was saved for twenty five. • 

It was cut into quarters for frontier change at a tavern losing 25% by weight to the melting pot. • 

It would have gone to melt completely before the 19th Century had it not been casually lost. • 

It lay undisturbed (save for the pass of the plough) for over two centuries until it was dug up. 

The study includes many illustrations and a map showing where the pistareens were found and a lot of other really good information.  I think you'll want to read this.

Here is the link.

http://numismatics.org/wikiuploads/CNL/Pistareens.pdf

The mint marks shown to the left are from the same linked study.


I'll add this link to my list of reference links on the first page of the blog.


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t

Tropical Storm Grace.

Grace seems to be following about the same path as Erika.  She is still days away and supposed to decrease to a depression around the West Indies.  We'll just have to watch that one for a while.

The surf this morning was one to two feet.  It looked a little rougher than I expected, but won't change much the next few days.

Happy Labor Day,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

9/30/13 Report - 450-Year-Old Shipwreck Being Salvaged, Dug Tampa City Hall Badge & More

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

Dug Badge
Find and Photo by William M.

First, here is the TBR Find of the Day (FOD).

William M. recently dug this old badge. Very nice dug item!  Great condition.

William went off beach for this find.  That is a good thing to do sometimes, especially when you have a good idea on a place to hunt and the beaches have been stale.

Way to go William!

I did a quick google search but didn't find this particular item yet.  

If you find out more about it, let me know.




A similar type of item was sold by the police benevolent society during the 2012 Republican National Convention.

Below is a picture of that modern fund-raising badge, which shows the Tampa city hall.

William's dug badge probably goes back to the early 1900s.

Here is the source link for the picture of the modern version.

http://tampapba.org/pba-news/tampa-police-rnc-2012-badges-coins-lapel-pins-and-sets/


I received an email from a female detectorist saying that she felt limited in her detecting because she didn't want to detect alone in isolated locations.  She was wondering about safety measures and any tips that anyone might be able to offer.

Many men prefer to have a hunting buddy, and that is certainly a good idea for a lot of reasons.  I think it would also be a very good idea for women detectorists.

I thought maybe some of you female detectorists, might provide some thoughts on safety or maybe get together for some buddy hunting.    Let me know.


There is only one day remaining to respond to the blog poll.  The early results seem to be suggesting some interesting things that have a practical significance for our hobby.  

Please respond to the poll if you haven't already.


Which is more valuable -  rare 15th and 16th century silver coins or pewter tableware of the same age?   You might be surprised.

A Florida based treasure hunting company is salvaging a 450-year-old shipwreck near the Dominican Republic and has found 15th and 16th century silver coins and a 16th century pewter tableware set complete with maker's marks.  The tableware is valued at millions of dollars.

Here are links that provide access to more of that story.

http://www.eturbonews.com/37855/divers-find-unexpected-treasures-shipwreck-dominican-republic


http://wrbw.membercenter.worldnow.com/story/23418372/divers-find-unexpected-treasures-among-coins-in-shipwreck-off-dominican-republic



The National Hurricane Center storm map shows nothing new.  The same two areas are shown with little change in position or strength.

On the Treasure Coast we are supposed to get a 2 - 3 foot surf for a few days now before the surf decreases a little.

The tides are still relatively flat.  The low tides have been pretty high lately.

Please respond to the poll, let me know if any of you women might want to form a buddy list or have any other good ideas, and let me know if you find anything on William's dug badge.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

3/9/12 Report - Info on Religious Medallion, Detecting Self-Test & Blockade Runners

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

A Treasure Coast Beach This Morning.

After two days of southeast winds, this isn't surprising. A lot of seaweed was washing up on our beaches.

Sea weed is a bad sign that indicates that a beach is filling.

The cut beach that i showed a day or two ago deteriorated. It still had some cliffs, but also had sea weed and had filled in. The beach in front of what remained of the cut was now mushy where it was firm before. All of that means that the sand was coming in.

I'm downgrading my Treasure Coast Beach Conditions rating to a 1(poor) again.

The Whites Dual Pulse is an easy swinging detector. That is what I used today because I sprained my back the other day and it feels lighter than a lot of other detectors because it is well balanced.

One detecting tip that I have for today is when going along a beach and you aren't hearing hardly any signals, deposit a few test targets of your own behind you, then on the way back see how many of them you miss. That will give you a self-check. I'll bet that at least 50% of detectorists will be surprised how many they miss.

If you try this self-check where the waves might hit, bury the test objects under a couple of inches of sand so they won't be washed away.

I'm not saying that it is always necessary to cover every inch of sand on a beach. I often use a loose scan pattern when I am sampling an area, but there are times when you should cover every inch. By using some test objects you will learn just how much you might be missing.

Concerning the medallion that I posted yesterday for ID, Laura Strolia, author the the book, The Marigalera of the 1715 Fleet, sent in some good information. I thought she might know something about the medallion.

Here is what she said.

The lettering on the one side refers to St. Ignatius of Loyola of the Society of Jesus. He is shown as a courageous Christian knight, as he fought in many battles early on in his life. The image depicts St. Ignatius defeating a dragon like St. George had done centuries before. This act represents ideal Christian chivalry, thus making him the patron saint of all soldiers. St. Ignatius was said to have laid down his sword under the Blessed Virgin Mary of Montserrat, and he then dedicated his life to God.

The letters and image on the reverse side refer to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception who was born without original sin.

The Jesuit collection at St. Louis University holds a silver reliquary showing St. Ignatius of Loyola on one side and the Immaculate Conception on the back of it. It dates back to 1650, so the combination of these two images on artifacts goes back a couple hundred years.

Thanks for the help Laura.

When you send in an item for ID, please try to get a good clear photo. Many cameras won't focus well when the object is to close to the lens. Also provide as much information as possible, such as size, material, and any associated finds or anything that might provide some clues.

I can not post every submitted item. And i certainly can't ID every item.

Just because an item is old doesn't necessarily mean that it was lost a long time ago. For example, I dug up a wheat penny the other day, but I also recently found one in circulation.

People sometimes carry around old things. If it shows the wear of time and is found with other similarly old items, that might help to narrow things down a bit.

Unfortunately items that have been in salt water can corrode very quickly. I recently dug up one of the new state quarters that was completely green encrusted and corroded. It certainly wan't old, but it looked like it would be. The soil or context that items are lost in have a lot to do with how they are protected or how they corrode.

I mentioned the Diggers TV program the other day. I found it hard to believe that they were digging up such old items in such good condition. Some of those items didn't look like they had been used at all.


Artifacts from the blockade runner, Modern Greece, will be preserved after sitting for fifty years in storage tanks.

A systematic survey of blockade runners off the North Carolina Coast is planned before those wrecks deteriorate even more.

Here is the link.

http://www.kjct8.com/news/30635467/detail.html

The seas will be slacking off a bit tomorrow and then return to about seven feet or so Sunday. I'm not encouraged by the predicted wind direction though.

The high tide this evening is going to be higher than normal.


Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net