5/29/18 Report - Silver Coin Find. Long Ater the Find. Recommendations for the Coin Collecting Community.

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

Isle of Man One Crown Silver Jubilee Coin

When you start detecting, you probably never think about ten, twenty or thirty years in the future.  You know what you found and where you found it and you know whatever else you've learned about your finds. One thing I appreciate more every year is the importance of good organization, labeling and storage. You'll read something or learn something and all of a sudden decide that you want to take another look at a particular item but can't remember where you put it, or worse yet, remember that you put it somewhere safe, but can't remember where that was. Or you find an item that you found long ago and researched, but now you don't remember what you learned about it. Maybe you can't even identify it anymore. You just remember that you once knew more about it.

That might sound like a memory problem, but if you've been hunting for a few decades and made thousands of finds every year, few people will be able to keep up with the large number of finds and all the research.  I'm often surprised by how often I learn something new about an item after I had it for a few decades.  Just today I found out that one coin I've had for years could be worth quite a bit more if it has a straight nine rather than a nine that is more curved.  You learn things like that, and sometimes its only after years have passed.  The bottom line on all that is that it helps to organize your finds, keep records and label them well, and store them safely.  I hate when old items get corroded or broken.

Same Isle of Man Silver Jubilee Coin.

This is the first more interesting coin that I ever found.  It is 80% silver and it is one of those things that you wouldn't expect to find in circulation or on a tourist beach.  I remember finding this one four decades ago on Hollywood Beach.  It is one that impressed me enough when I picked it up that I still remember it.  At that time I was mostly finding clad spending change.  Being over 28 grams and 26 mm in diameter, it was not difficult to detect.

 I didn't know much about this coin other than it was a different and nice looking foreign coin. You couldn't find all the information on the internet like you can today, so it wasn't until much later that I learned more about it.

Over the years not only do you learn more about old finds, but more generally you'll look at them differently and perhaps appreciate them in a deeper way.  Of course there are also some finds that you'll learn are nothing more than junk, but even with those you might benefit from the journey.

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The American Numismatic Association is concerned that fewer and fewer people are attending coin conventions. It seems that millennials are more interested in things other than coin collecting and choose to spend there money on things like iPhones rather than collecting.

Here are some recommendations from David Bowers concerning that.

Those in numismatics who emphasize the art, history, and romance of numismatics will stay for a long period of time, even lifetimes. These elements are essential.

 
Specialization is the key to longevity. If you look at the officers and contributors of articles to Early American Coppers, Colonial Coin Collectors Club,Liberty Seated Coin Club, Numismatic Bibliomania Society, Civil War Token Society, Token and Medal Society, John Reich Collectors Society, and other specialized groups you will see that most have been active for years! 

As I mentioned earlier, like it or not, many, if not most, new collectors are attracted by gold and silver, or by telemarketers offering modern coins in high grades, as well as a lot of products advertised in USA Today, by telemarketers, and others, that have no realistic aftermarket. These people leave quickly, never to be heard from again. Neither the ANA nor the PNG is even slightly interested in regulating ethics, giving excuses such as “afraid of lawsuits,” etc. As a proponent of ethics in numismatics, and as having worked with the Federal Trade Commission to put fraudsters in jail, I can say that NO perps ever threatened to sue the ANA or the PNG. Nothing but nothing is being done about ethics. The ANA and PNG act on specific complaints, but that is about it. How sad. 

Young Numismatists, say ages 8 to 15, are the brightest and the best. Encourage them in any way possible. As Gary Adkins knows, the ANA already scores high points on this. 

One of the greatest potentials for ANA is people past the age of 65, especially those who are educated and have been successful in life. Millions of people are potentials for learning about numismatics and the ANA. With proper promotion and education, thousands of retirees might well come into the hobby. 

For Whitman (for which I am the numismatic director) or, if they pass on the idea, for the ANA I volunteer to create a book on how specializing is the key to numismatic enjoyment and longevity.

Here is the link for more of what David Bowers had to say about that.

http://news.coinupdate.com/bowers-on-collecting-changes-for-the-american-numismatic-association/

Many detectorists are also coin collectors although many are not.  A lot of what Mr. Bowers says about coin-collecting applies to metal detecting too.

Back a few years ago I conducted a poll in this blog and found that 93% of the respondents were over 35 years old and over half were over 56 years old. The biggest age group was the 56 to 65 age group.

In the future, I'll have more to say about how coin-collecting and how the metal detecting hobbies are doing.

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Alberto is now in Alabama and heading north.  We're going to have a few days of small surf.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comc

2/17/18 Report - The Very Real Threat to Treasure Hunting That You Need to Know About.

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

I just ran across a web site that you need to see. It is described as follows: "This website is intended for people fighting treasure hunters all over the world. It is the website I wish I had when I was fighting the treasure hunting legislation passed in Portugal in 1993 and repealed in 1995, fortunately before the government could issue any salvage permits. I hope you enjoy it."

The same web page leads with the following quotes. "Treasure Hunting! Always shallow, no matter how low treasure hunters sink." and, "You can say Expert Treasure-Hunter instead of Burglar if you like. Some of them do. Its all the same to us."  

(See http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/index_treasurehunters.htm.)

A lot of different things are all the same to them.  They seem incapable or unwilling to make important distinctions.

The web site does not generally make clear what they consider a treasure hunter to be other than evil. They do acknowledge two categories of treasure hunter. They say, "There is a small, silent minority who really finds and rescues precious cargoes, and that goes largely unnoticed by the general public."  They describe the other group as, "The large, noisy majority who advertises its activity in the press, on the internet, and through PR agencies in search of ignorant investors rarely rewards its investors."  Overall, their simple-minded cartoonish characterizations are more suited to propaganda than education, even though the web page is published on a state university site.

Definitions are critical for clear communication.  Here is a Merriam-Webster definition of "treasure" that I found on the internet.

Definition of treasure

1a (1) : wealth (such as money, jewels, or precious metals) stored up or hoarded 

• buried treasure

 

(2) : wealth of any kind or in any form : riches

: a store of money in reserve

2: something of great worth or value; also : a person esteemed as rare or precious

: a collection of precious things

I'm sure there are detectorists that would consider their activities to be a type of treasure hunting, and  there are treasure hunters that do not hunt artifacts at all, such as gold miners and nugget shooters.  Maybe I don't really know what a treasure hunter is, but they definitely do not use the term the same way I do.  For them it seems to boil down to treasure hunting is not what they do and is evil.  

You'll find the link to the page I'm talking about below, and I highly recommend that you take a look at it.  I'll summarize a number of their statements in this post, but I'll give you the link and hope you check it out for yourself.

First, the author says that treasure hunters can not "do archaeology with high standards."  He says that treasure hunting companies depend on investor money and can not follow good standards and make enough money to survive.  That would be no problem if treasure hunters were funded by the tax-payers like these academicians.  They would have plenty of time to sit around drinking coffee in the faculty lounge and still have time to linger over each and every grain of sand when they feel like wandering out to the site.  I spent years in academia myself and know the torrid pace.

Second, he says that archaeologists and treasure hunters can not work together.  Basically he says that treasure hunters have no ethical code and sell artifacts for profit, while archaeologists have an ethical code, and I assume, perfectly adhere to it without exception.  Of course I disagree with both of those propositions.  The common view is that treasure hunters are motivated by greed and profit, while archaeologists don't care at all about fame or fortune.  It sounds like archaeologists donate all of their time, would not advance their career by taking credit for discoveries and make all of their findings freely available to the public, who they claim to serve.   I'm appalled by the tax-payer funded projects that are only published in expensive books instead of freely on the internet.

He says treasure hunters and archaeologists can not work together because archaeologists are bound by an ethical code and treasure hunters have none. Again, treasure hunter bad, archaeologists good.  That is what it comes down to.  That is why they can not work together.

He says that archaeology can be conducted by private organizations and give one example of such an organization. Their primary virtue of that company is that they never sold one artifact. I wonder if those artifacts that went unsold were ever seen by the public or if they are sitting in an office or dusty basement.

He then gives four reasons that archaeology collections should be kept together. I won't disagree with any of those, but I will say that museums sell artifacts and artifacts are deaccessed.  This actually raises some good questions that deserve to be explored in more detail some other time.

I'll skip to his last two points now.

He says that treasure hunting is not a profitable investment. He would have us believe that treasure hunting is done only for greed and profit, but that treasure hunting is not profitable.  I guess that is why treasure hunters have to cheat investors.

Is there a future for treasure hunting?  Here is his answer.  No. More and more countries are forbidding this activity in their national waters. Also, most museums have adopted a ban on the purchase of items salvaged from shipwrecks.

Here is the link if you want to read the rest of that page.

http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/treasurehunters_04faqs.htm


Here is the link for the profile of the author.

http://nautarch.tamu.edu/academic/FACULTY/castro.shtml

It was difficult for me to not go on at length in response to each and every item, but that would take forever.  I will perhaps address some of it more in the future.

I have never believed that universities should hire their own students as instructors.  That type of academic incest results in the kind of simplistic and extreme thinking you will see when you visit these web sites.

As part of the public for whom archaeology claims to be working, and as tax-payers, who support public universities and archaeology, and being among those most actively interested in the our past, I hope you will take a look at these web sites and judge for yourself. If this type of thinking goes unchallenged by good common sense, there will be no more treasure hunting or anything closely resembling treasure hunting.  That means the end to the metal detecting hobby.

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Before ending today, I want to express my deepest sorrow to the families, friends and acquaintances of those killed or injured in the recent school shootings.

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Appreciate the important things in life,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

2/5/15 Report - National Geographic State of the Detecting Hobby Overview. More On Pinpointing. One Method Illustrated.

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


Here is a good general article on the state of the metal detecting hobby and the opposition.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/diggers/articles/metal-detecting-101/

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I talked about using pinpointers not too long ago.  I almost never use a pinpointer but some people do.  A pinpointer can help.   Some pinpointers are inexpensive and not very good while others cost nearly as much as a basic metal detector and are very powerful.  Some can even be used submerged.

You can use a screwdriver to pop coins and other small items out of the ground without any digging, but if you use a screwdriver, you need to be able to pinpoint well.   That is a very helpful skill in any case.

Second. if you use a screw driver, you might want to file down any sharp edges to minimize scratching in case you do make a mistake and hit the object.

In addition to the screw driver, you might also use a probe.  An old antique car radio antennae with the little chrome ball on the end will work.  If you use a probe carefully, you can touch and locate the coin without scratching it.  That method doesn't work well in rocky ground though.

Sand can be sifted quickly, so you won't need a pinpointer on a beach, but you can improve your pinpointing skills by learning to use your detector better.  

There are the obvious things you can do, such as switch to all-metals, non-motion, or pinpoint mode.

Additional methods include cutting down sensitivity or detuning or raising the coil higher to diminish the area that produces a signal.

Another technique you can use in a hole, involves putting the coil at something like a 45 degree angle from the ground and rotating the coil around the edge of the hole to locate where the target lies relative to the hole. (See illustration.)

I often find this method useful, especially when the target is deep and you have to scoop more than once.  This method will quickly tell you if the object is to one side of the center of the hole. 

Some elongated objects can be difficult.  The signal, depending upon the angle of the sweep, can appear to be at the end of the object rather than over the center.  In that case your first scoop might be off-center.  This method illustrated below can quickly tell you if that is the case.

Another technique that can help is to set the coil at a 45 degree angle next to the hole and facing the hole so any movement of the target is detected as you move sand or dirt.  To use that method you should be using a non-metallic trowel or digger.

Also setting the coil by the hole as dirt is dug or thrown towards the coil or onto the coil will tell you when the target has been moved.

In sand I often use my hand to feel for a target when I am getting close rather than continuing to scoop. 

Of course a handful of dirt swung over or onto the coil will also tell you if the target is in your hand.

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We have a small surf on the Treasure Coast today.  The wind is from the South, but will switch around this afternoon and be coming from the North, continuing into tomorrow.  The prediction for tomorrow is for a four to six foot surf.  That might create a few cuts, but probably not produce really old stuff.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@Comcast.net