12/1/15 Report - Dune Erosion Book. Mining Silver For the Potosi Mint. Jamestown Archaeology. Civil War Button Find.

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

Civil War Button Found by Dan B.

About the Button

Yesterday I showed a couple button finds.  Here is another.  This one by Dan B.  Dan sent the photos and reference material.  This Civil War button is not from the Treasure Coast.  A great button find though.

Dan also has some inland finds that I haven't shown yet.

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Here is a book on dune erosion.  You can look at a preview of the book online.  Check out the erosion factors listed on page 12.  I've talked about most of them in this blog at some length at one time or another.

This is an academic book and isn't easy to understand, but if you are interested in understanding erosion you might want to take a look.

https://books.google.com/books?id=TXCQCfaL0DQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

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Have you ever thought about Potosi silver cobs and where they come from?  It is fascinating history. Here are a couple descriptions of how the silver was mined.

Rodrigo de Loaisa, described the typical weeklong stint in the mines: “The Indians enter these infernal pits by some leather ropes like staircases ... Once inside, they spend the whole week in there without emerging, working with tallow candles. They are in great danger inside there ... If 20 healthy Indians enter on Monday, half may emerge crippled on Saturday.”

According to another Spaniard, Alfonso Messia, Indian laborers descended hundreds of feet into the mines, “where the night is perpetual. It is always necessary to work by candlelight, with the air thick and evil-smelling, enclosed in the bowels of the earth.

The ascent and descent are highly dangerous, for they come up loaded with their sack of metal tied to their backs, taking fully four or five hours step by step, and if they make the slightest false step they may fall seven hundred feet.”

That is how the Treasure Coast beach cob that I showed the other day started.  It was a long journey from there to where it finally ended up in the Vero area.

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Here is an article on the archaeological dig going on at Jamestown.  It discusses some artifacts and religion in the colony.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/november-web-only/jamestown-religious-mystery.html

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I'm downgrading my Treasure Coast Treasure Beach Detecting Conditions rating down to a 1.

There could still be a few leftovers out there.

The surf will be down to 1 or 2 feet by Friday.  It will then increase up to something like 4 - 6 feet for the weekend.

Watch the wind, which will be changing Thursday.  It will be coming from the north for a few days.

I'll be posting a poll soon to get an idea of how much was found in November.

Evidently the pictures for this post weren't showing up.  I hope they are working now.

Happy hunting
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

10/12/15 Report - 100th Anniversary of One World-Famous Vero Find. The Religion Of Christopher Columbus.

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


You undoubtedly already know that this is the 300th anniversary of the 1715 Fleet disaster, but did you know that this is the 100th anniversary of a world-famous land-based discovery made within the boundaries of  Indian River County?

In 1915 human bones associated with mammal fossils from the Pleistocene were found in the banks of a canal.  Some think those bones, along with other finds at the same site, show that humans were in Florida much earlier than previously thought possible. 

Here is one paragraph from the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee web site.

Today, the conventional view has it that humans began the trek, on foot or by boat, to North America around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. This is in part due to the Old Vero Man Site finds.  Newer DNA testing is even suggesting a much earlier migration by at least another 10,000 years. This would easily allow for humans in Florida 14,000 years ago. However the controversy on how old the "Vero Man" was does remain. Carbon dating, as a technology, was not available before the 1950’s. The original bones are listed as missing in 1945 while in transit from the Florida Geological Survey in Tallahassee to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. We need new artifacts to test.

So the conventional view is that the indigenous populations are of European descent too.  They just beat Columbus by thousands of years.

It seems that the government has a long history of losing important artifacts.  

You can visit the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee web site by using the following link.

http://www.oviasc.org/Old-Vero-Man-Site-History--Old-Vero-Ice-Age-Sites-Commitee--preserving-and-appropriately-excavating-important-Ice-Age-archaeological-and-paleontological-sites-in-Vero-Beach-and-Indian-River-County.html

Ales Hrdlicka authored a paper that was published as Bulletin 66 of the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology.    The title is Recent Discoveries Attributed to Early Man in America. It was published in 1918.

Below is a photo of the Vero man site as published in that bulletin.  Notice the two arrows pointing to the location of human bone finds.

Below is another illustration from the bulletin.

This is not the only illustration showing the stratigraphy of the site and the location of various finds.

Notice how the several bones were discovered on the boundary between the second and third layer.  It is not unusual to make finds on the beach that are on top of a lower layer.  There are similarities between layers found at inland sites and on a beach.  The main difference is that the top layers on a beach are displaced much more frequently.

The mystery of Vero Man is yet to be resolved to the satisfaction of many.  Evidence is being collected and you can be a part of the project.  Volunteer opportunities will be available in 2016.  You can also tour the site or visit displays.  You can learn more about that at the OVIAC web site.

You can read the entire Smithsonian Bulletin 66 online.  Only part of it concerns the Vero site, but I think you'll find it very interesting.

It can be found through books.google.com.

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Columbus is a controversial figure to some.  With Columbus day coming tomorrow, below is an excerpt from an article that you might want to read.

I believe that there are two keys to understanding Columbus:  his Catholic faith and his courage. Columbus lived in a religious age, but even in his time he was noted for the fervor of his faith. Masses, penances, pilgrimages, retreats, the reading of the Bible, all the aspects of devotion that the Catholic faith offered, Columbus engaged in these things all of his life. Any ship he commanded was scrupulous in religious observances, with the Salve Regina being chanted by the crew each evening at Vespers. As his son Ferdinand noted:   “He was so strict in matters of religion that for fasting and saying prayers he might have been taken for a member of a religious order.”

Here is the link.

http://www.catholicstand.com/columbus-catholicism-courage/

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On the Treasure Coast we're supposed to have a few days of one-foot surf.  Then out about a week in the future, the prediction is for up to nine feet.  

I'd give that about a 1 percent chance of actually happening, but it would be nice to get a big surf like that, especially if we could get some north/northeast winds at the same time.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

10/14/14 Report - Mounted Eight Escudo. Christopher Columbus. Treasure Coast Beaches Lost Some Sand.

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

Lot 1 In The Current Sedwick Coins Online Auction.
Source: http://www.icollector.com/Treasure-and-World-Coin-Auction-16_as32699

One day I talked about mounting your coin finds.  In another post I showed some  gold coins that were dug already mounted.

Here is another example of a mounted gold coin.  This one is the first lot in the current SedwickCoins treasure auction.  It is a very nice eight-escudo.  It makes a great pendant, doesn't it?
The picture is from the online auction catalog. 

That also reminded me that if you have an extremely fine coin or maybe a graded coin, you might not want to mount those because mounting can cause damage to coins.  Sometimes you can see marks on coins where they were mounted.


Here is a good article entitled, The Catholic Spirit of Christopher Columbus.  Very good article giving the religious motives for seeking the New World as well as the religious beliefs and practices of the explorers during the voyage.

Be sure to read the list of myths at the bottom of the article.

https://www.americaneedsfatima.org/Varied/the-catholic-spirit-of-christopher-columbus.html

 Yesterday I went to the beach to see what has been happening.   Here are a couple pictures showing recent sand loss on one Treasure Coast shipwreck beach.

As you know, we've had slightly rougher seas lately.

The shadows make the cuts look better than they actually are.   They were not very big at all, yet there was some loss of sand.

The sand near the water line was relatively firm.

Note the sea weed indicating some fill since the erosion.

Some beaches showed sand loss while others did not.







Hurricane Gonzalo is out there, but I'm more interested in the disturbance following Gonzalo.  Gonzalo is headed north into the Atlantic.

The Treasure Coast is getting around a three foot surf today.  The tides have flattened out again.  There will be a few new shallow dips to be found.  The predicted surf for this week is no higher than around 4 feet now.  That is down a little from earlier predictions.

 I saw this cute little baby gopher turtle today.


I was wondering how many people studied and benefited from the video that I posted the other day. 

People tend to think that a specific item will give a certain signal, and that is often the case, but other things will affect the signal, such as the position of the object and sweep speed.

I didn't go into that at great length the other day, but I think you can see evidence of that in the video. 

Certainly the copper tag and gold ring sounded different when they were not laying flat.  The video shows how you can better learn to understand what you detector is trying to tell you.

That is all for today.   Keep an eye on what is going on in the Atlantic.

Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@Comcast.net