8/3/19 Report - Order of Calatrava. Research Reveals Items Salvaged At Palmar de Ays. Beach Changes and Beach Slopes.

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

Source: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Calatrava

"Calatrava is the Arabic name of a castle recovered from the Moslems, in 1147, by the King of Castile, Alfonso VII, called el Emperador. Located in what was then the southernmost border of Castile, this conquest was more difficult to keep than to make, especially at a time with neither standing armies nor garrisons were known. In part to correct this deficiency, the military orders such as Knights Templars were founded, where men could fulfill a vow of perpetual war against the Muslim. The Templars, however, were unable to hold Calatrava, and the king found further volunteer warriors when Raymond, Abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Fitero offered himself. 

This step is said to have been suggested to the abbot by Father Diego Velázquez, a simple monk, but one who had been a knight, and thus was well acquainted with military matters. Diego was inspired with the idea of employing the lay brothers of the abbey to defend Calatrava. These Cistercian lay brothers--at that time a recent innovation in monastic life--not being in Holy orders, were variously employed in manual trades such as those of tending herds, construction, farm labor, or husbandry. Diego recommended that they become soldiers of the Cross. Thus a new order was created in 1157...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Calatrava for more about that.

You'll see below why I brought that up today.

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Some beaches are relatively steep and some flatter, but the slope also can change from day to day.  I talked about that yesterday.

The size of the grains of sand has a lot to do with the slope of the beach.  Beaches with smaller grains tend to be flatter.

People tend to think about the waves and incoming water, but the water is continually washing out as well as in. The outgoing water is as important as the incoming water.  What you see is the net effect.

The amount of force of the incoming water determines what gets washed in, and the amount of force of the outgoing water determines what gets washed out.  It is always a tug of war.

The reason that small grained beaches are flatter is that there is more runoff.  Most of the water that flows onto the beach flows back off.  When it the water flows off, it takes some things with it, depending upon a number of factors.

When the grains are course and the beach is porous, some of the water does not flow back out.  There is always a balancing act between the incoming and outgoing forces.  Erosion occurs when more sand is getting washed out, and accretion occurs when more sand is getting washed in AND is dropped on the beach.  It gets dropped where the force of water decreases to the point that it is no longer carried along.  All that might seem perfectly obvious, but if you can visualize it, I think you'll find it very helpful.

As I've explained before, a certain amount of force is required to get an object moving, and a certain amount of force is required to keep it moving.  When the force decreases enough, items get deposited.  That is how sand is moved and deposited, and that is how coin lines and holes are formed.  Of course, it takes less force to move sand than coins, and they have different "drop points" too.

Bigger waves tend to move larger particles, which creates a steeper beach.  In summer you generally have smaller waves that push in and drop off smaller particles and that creates a flatter beach.

Most of the time when you get erosion, the sand doesn't go very far and waits just off shore to be washed in again.  The same sand keeps getting recycled in and out.  That sand movement, which I sometimes refer to as superficial, does not uncover any old items.  It is just the recycling of the same sand.  When that sand moves, there is not likely to be anything old in it.  Other objects require more force to move and tend to be deeper.  Enough sand has to be moved for them to be first uncovered and then moved up the slope.  They aren't going anywhere though until they are first uncovered.

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Laura Strolia, 1715 Fleet researcher and author of the book I've mentioned before, The Marigalara of the 1715 Fleet, was translating a document from the Spanish archives mentioning valuable items being salvaged from the water at Palmar de Ays.  Notice that a enameled gold item was specifically mentioned.

Here is some of what she said.

I just finished page 240 of my book on the 1715 fleet, and coincidentally, I recently translated a document from the archives which may contain an answer for your posted object. Officials had sent a shipment of valuable items to the Sevillian Consulado in Spain for sorting. These goods were salvaged from the waters at Palmar de Ays and verification was needed as to whom owned them. One of the objects was listed as “una venera de calatrava en una conchita de vidrio guarnecida y su rosa de filigrana de oro” (AGI, Contratacíon, leg. 640, Nov. 17, 1716, Cádiz). This was a scallop (badge) of the Order of Calatrava. The small shell was garnished with (enameled) glass and its rose was of gold filigree...  

Hope this helps—Laura Strolia.

ps I literally translated the list of goods on the same day you displayed the Calatrava badge, but I did not  see the post until today. There is no doubt that God works through us all to help each other. 

Thanks much for sharing your research Laura. 

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I have two threads going that I plan to continue - dating items and beach dynamics.  I also have some other topics in mind. 

We are having big tides now and around a two-foot surf.

There is one system on the map that is worth watching.

Source: nhc,noaa.gov

That system is headed in our general direction and looks like it will show more development some time next week.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

6/29/16 Report - Compact and Loose Beach Sand. How It Happens and Why It Is Important To The Detectorist.

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

Did you ever walk out onto the beach and sink in the sand up to your ankles?  It is like that sometimes.  Sometimes the sand is soft and fluffy and other times it is packed and firm.  Sand is sand, so what makes the difference?

Actually there are a variety of types of sand.  There is sand made of rocks, shells or coral for example.  And each of those an be worn and polished to different degrees.

But what makes it fluffy or firm?  Sand that is firm has little space between the grains, but that isn't the only important thing.  The amount of friction between the grains is very important.

Grains that are smooth and round barely touch each other, so there is little friction.

Angular grains, on the other hand, will settle, touching each other at multiple locations and over various areas, interlocking something like stones in a wall.

Here are two illustrations from the SandScapes website showing smooth grains compared to angular grains.

Smooth Grains (left) and Angular Grains (right).
Source: http://sandscapes.com/sandtech.html

The surf smooths sand over time, and like everything else on a beach, sand gets sifted and sorted, as do shells and lost objects such as coins and rings.

Irregular grains can be compacted, as shown in the next illustration from the same site.

Here is what the web site says.  Uncompacted sand has relatively large pore spaces between the grains but compacted sand shrinks these spaces increasing points of contact between the individual grains and thereby increasing the friction between them. The more friction there is, the more resistant the grains are to separation.

One other important dynamic is "cross-linking", a term from soils engineering. Forcing randomly shaped grains tightly together causes many of them to naturally cross-link. Cross-linking is a common technique in masonry work where vertical joints between bricks, stones and block joints are intentionally staggered thereby vastly increasing the strength of the structure.

...Finer sands will naturally have smaller pore spaces and angular grains are most likely to tightly interlock and cross-link. Rounded grains will always have larger pore spaces between grains no matter how well compacted, and a naturally smooth surface further reduces friction. Beyond being merely rounded as the individual grains become more spherically shaped the grains also become incapable of cross-linking. Try to imagine stacking a pile of bowling balls...


I am talking about sand here, not clay or silt.  Clay has a particle size ranging from .002 inches down, and silt has a particle size ranging from .003 inches to .002 inches.  Clay and silt are cohesive and tightly bound together by molecular attraction.

I always like to see clay or silt exposed on a beach, but it does not happen very often.

Sand is not compacted by downward pressure so much as vibration.  A compactor, maybe like one used to compact sand for paving bricks on a driveway, vibrates.  The vibrations penetrate down through the sand.

Both construction workers and sand sculptors add water to sand before compacting, and they generally do it in layers.

So how does sand get compacted on the beach?  Well, first off you want relatively small grain sand. Then water.  Then the third thing is vibration.

The water is easy enough to come by, but what causes the vibration.  My thought is that the pounding surf does an excellent job of pushing pressure waves down through saturated or semi-saturated sand. You can hear the crashing surf miles away if you are someplace where it is not too noisy.

Enough of the how, now we'll get to why it is important.

If you are hunting recent drops in dry sand all of this doesn't matter much, but if you want to find older things, it is more important.

First off, I think almost everybody agrees that deep fluffy sand is not a good sign for the detectorist that wants to something other than recent drops.

Some people might say that things sink in soft fluffy sand.  When you drop something having weight, that certainly happens, but once it sets there a while it is not going to sink any deeper without some sort of agitation.  There is agitation of various kinds, though.  In the dry sand, wind moves sand, and so does rain, as do people walking and running.  But most important to me is the agitation caused by the surf flowing and pounding, and in some cases washing up more sand to cover what ever was there before.

Compacted sand, will not move as easily as loose sand.  Loose sand will wash away, while the more compacted sand remains.   Of course that compact sand could eventually wash away too, but it will take more to do it.  To use terminology I recently used, the trigger point will have to be higher before the compacted sand will start to move.

The vast majority of cobs that I've found have not been deeply buried in the sand.  Some were visible on the surface.  Almost all have been within a couple inches of the surface.  They are seldom found in soft fluffy sand, but sometimes they are in a slab of sand that just came off the front of an eroded cliff or flipped up over the face of a cut.

Compact sand is a good sign.  I often go by feel as well as sight.

I should stop there for now.

I have fascinating information about counterfeiting colonial coinage that I'll get into some day soon.

Here is the link to the web site I referenced a lot today.


http://www.sandscapes.com/sandtech.html


Nothing much has changed on the beach.  We still have a small surf.


Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net