Treasure Hunting

I promised myself I wouldn’t post about our friends across the pond and their mega-finds for awhile, but the story of bus driver Tom Peirce was just too good to resist sharing.

Amateur treasure hunter and self-confessed “metal detector fanatic” was combing a field he had stumbled upon after taking a group of school kids out for a day at a farm near Swanage, Dorset. After asking the farmer/land-owner for permission to search the two-acre field, Peirce returned with his friend Les Keith and within a few minutes his metal detector started sounding off.

Buried 10 inches under the farm land was a partial axe head. Digging even deeper revealed even more. Over the next two days Peirce and Keith uncovered nearly 500 bronze age artifacts, each one over 3,000 years old and one of the biggest hoards found in Britain!

In total, the loot is worth over 80,000 pounds (over $150,000.00), and the 60 year old bus driver will be splitting the proceeds with the farmer/land-owner, Alfie O’Connell.

What really drew me to share this story was Peirce’s quote “You do it as a hobby - you don’t do it for the money but if you strike it lucky then so be it” - and that is so true. This is a hobby; it’s fun, invigorating, exciting. It give history buff’s an excuse to research another time and era. It gives environmentalists an excuse to clean up the earth. It gives the rest of us something to do! Getting rich is just a bonus.

Happy hunting everyone! Spring is on the way!
- Elizabeth

Check out the full story at www.DailyMail.co.uk.

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If you inherited a unique and significant relic from a dying culture and no one knew you had it, would you give it back?

Marilyn Lewis of Port Townsend, Washington had the opportunity to answer that question last year when she inherited a Shaman’s mask with the faint inscription “Taken from a medicine man’s grave on King Island.” Her answer to the question: “yes.”

The story goes like this: In 1898 Lewis’ great uncle Nate traveled by steamship from Seattle to Alaska to try his luck in the Gold Rush. After spending three years there, working as a bartender and apparently not finding any gold, Nate went back home. He kept notes from his time in Alaska but no mention was ever made of King Island. In 1927 Nate gave the mask to Lewis’ father, Bill. For the next four decades the mask remained in the Lewis family. Until last year when Bill passed the mask on to Marilyn, asking if she would find where it came from.

Online research led Lewis to an abandoned Inupiat Eskimo village, littered with crumbling homes perched high on stilts. The people of King Island have long since re-located 80 miles southeast of the Bering Sea island to Alaska’s western coast, and all that remains of their culture is struggling to survive in the city of Nome. Lewis personally took the wooden mask with red-ochre face, beaked nose and black painted hair, to Alaska and delivered it to Tribal Coordinator of the King Island Native Community, Charlene Saclamana.

Saclamana said: “It gives me and my family something tangible from our past. We’ve lost so much of the culture. We were eager to have the mask back in our possession. We never had anything that well preserved from the island.”

Currently, the mask resides in an Alaskan museum and will be included in an exhibit featuring the style and ingenuity of ancient Bering Sea Eskimos. It serves as a significant piece of history and stands as a symbol of hope for King Island culture.

Would you have put as much effort into returning a relic you inherited? And where would you have started your research? Check out the original article and learn more about the King Island culture at Anchorage Daily News Online.

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Radio Prague, Czech Republic is reporting the story of a young relic hunter who tragically died two years ago in an apartment fire. When fire fighters arrived at the scene they saw an apartment “chock-full of strange looking metal objects.” There were more than 3,000 items in the man’s one bedroom apartment and with the help of experts from the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Archaeological Institute, the public is now realizing the man was an “amateur archaeologist,” maybe just another metal detectorist like ourselves.

On the black market these items, some of which are prehistoric, are worth millions of dollars. But as they have been found with no documentation or records about where they were found, they have almost no scientific value. There are bowls, cups, clips, bracelets, pins, rings, axes and more.

Miroslav Dobeš of the Archaeological Institute lamented lack of documentation over a spectacle-shaped pendant, one of the oldest copper objects found in Central Europe that dates back to roughly 4,000 B.C., has zero scientific value, and leaves historians baffled as to where it came from.

I’m not too crazy about the anti-metal-detectorist stance this article takes, but I do agree that it’s important to log where you’ve been and what you’ve found. And with today’s accessibility to digital cameras there is no reason us metal detectorists can’t keep good track of our relics and hunting grounds - if for no other reason than to show ‘em off!

The thrill of metal detecting, relic hunting, and coin shooting is about finding something significant to history sharing it with others. When you find that CSA belt buckle and see it lying in the same place a solder fell over 100 years ago you should preserve not only the metal object out of the ground, but the story of the solder that wore it - where it places him on the battlefield, among his troops and beside his friends.

I think now is as good a time as any to learn from someone else’s mistake and document your finds. Good luck and happy hunting!

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As always, the friends behind TreasureHunting.com watch for news of unique treasure finds worldwide. Despite having only lived and treasure hunted in America, we envy the metal detectorists across the big-pond with their rich history that goes back thousands of years, through so many civilizations. And today we stumbled upon an article that makes us want to grab our detectors and hop on a plane to Europe now more than ever!

In north-east England, North Yorkshire to be exact, a metal detectorist found and recovered a frightening little object. Made of copper, and depicting the face of a “wild, violent and drunken female nymph” this find might have creeped us out at first. But thank goodness our fellow treasure hunter hung onto the little female figurine because it was identified and purchased by the Yorkshire Museum as a rare 2,000 year old Roman lamp!

Apparently only a handful of these lamps have ever been discovered in Britain and this one is in “brilliant” condition. The frightening head is thought to be that of a “Maenad” which translates to “raving ones,” who, in Greek and Roman mythology were the drunken, violent worshippers of Dionysus - God of mystery, wine and intoxication. Museum officials say it was common for Roman lamps to show the Maenad figures, as it was an example of what not to let yourself become.

If you had to create an object out of metal to warn future generations about “what not to let yourself become” - what would you make? For us, a violent, drunken nymph is a good place to start…

See the original article as listed in The Press here.

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Treasure hunting in the Philippines has been an exciting, promising hobby since World War II. Booty is supposedly scattered across Southeast Asia, hidden by Japanese occupation forces before the U.S. liberated the country and the exotic caves provide endless hope for treasure hunters and metal detectorists alike.

But as of early 2008, only Filipino citizens are allowed to conduct any kind of treasure hunt - meaning all booty is off limits to treasure hunting tourists like you and me! But it isn’t easy for the citizens either as they’ll need a one-year permit from the government and they’ll have to post a “surety bond” if the caves are on public or private land.

Why now, you ask? Well, their government has declared “all caves of cultural, palaeontological and historical value, with ancestral domains” and significant caves are off limits completely! This prompted all caves to come under government regulations to protect the country’s heritage and all items found and determined to have historical or cultural value will now revert to the government, while a committee will determine the share for the finder of other items of value.

The moral of the story - Look up the latest laws before you take your metal detector on vacation with you and stay up-to-date in order to stay out of trouble!

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Been hoping to stumble across something new while out treasure hunting? Come 2009, you might be lucky enough to find a new Lincoln Penny. The Associated Press just released an artist’s renderings provided by the U.S. Mint showing four of the designs under consideration to replace the “tails” side of our beloved penny. The change (no pun intended) to the coin is in observance of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, and the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the Lincoln penny. The US Mint will be introducing four rotating designs depicting different aspects of Lincoln’s life. No changes will be made to the “head” side of the penny.

Are you getting tired of all the new designs being introduced by the US Mint? The quarters had a big face lift, followed by the nickel, and now we’re seeing it happen to the penny. Wasn’t there just a bill sent to congress to remove the penny from circulation? I think it’s safe to say, the penny’s going to be around for plenty of years to come.

Haven’t had enough penny news? Here’s more for you to enjoy:
Controversy over the Lincoln Penny
Coin Values Table for Lincoln Pennies
History of the Lincoln Cent
The US Penny - Enchanted Learning
The Lincoln Cent Appears

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Stop the presses! Metal detecting has gone Hollywood. If you’ve ever wanted to see a metal detector larger-than-life, this could be your chance. King of California stars Michael Douglas as a fresh-out-of-the-mental institution father, and Evan Rachel Wood as his emancipated teenage daughter, as they venture together on a quest for an ancient Spanish treasure buried beneath their local Costco in this “darkly funny, exciting and surprisingly hopeful take on the modern family and the American dream,” says an anonymous commenter on IMDB.

The movie was released in the US on September 14th 2007, and is playing in a limited number of theaters. The reviews for this film are mixed, but generally favorable, even being called a good sequel of sorts to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Here’s the trailer for the movie:

Movie Reviews:
NY Times
Rolling Stone
MercuryNews

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A location near Finley, Tennessee was used as a bombing range during World War II, covering over 2,300 acres. A metal detecting survey was done in the area, and it was determined that Finley isn’t likely to contain any unexploded bombs or related hazards. The tests were run to check for residual bombing materials in the top 2 to 4 feet of soil, and there’s no mention of the type of metal detector that was used.

This is all part of the DERP-FUDS program, or Defense Environmental Restoration Program for Formerly Used Defense Sites. The corp is working its way through thousands of fields, and progressing as money becomes available.

It’s interesting to see all the ways metal detectors are used. So many people see them as being only used as hobby, but clearly metal detectors have much greater uses than finding buried treasure.

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Over 280 metal detector enthusiasts visited Englefield Estate on Sunday, September 9th, in hopes of finding rare treasures, and also to raise money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, in memory of a local detector, George Pearce, who died from the disease in 2005.

Among the items found was an Iron Age gold quarter stater, engraved with the image of a rearing horse, coming from the Atrebates tribe that was spread across south east England.

Another find was a bronze statuette of Neptune, but the event’s organizers are skeptical about the Roman authenticity. Wessex Metal Detecting Association chairman Jim Bradshaw said,

“I’m not too happy with the provenance of the statue. To start with, it hasn’t been in the soil for long – it’s far too clean. Also, it has traces of paint, which would indicate that it’s a recent loss.”

Sounds like it was a great day, and a successful rally for the charity. Apparently, the site has been occupied for over 2000 years, so you know it’s filled with tons of relics just waiting to be found.

Have you been to Englefield Estate? If you have, let us know in the comments. Sounds like an amazing place.

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