Amateurs Finding Objects There are a lot of things being found ever since the advent of the metal detector. You can go out into parks, on to beaches and other places and many times you will see someone with one of the metal detectors combing the area and hoping to hear a signal. After they first came out it wasn’t long before a small tube like one you could hold in your hand appeared which could precisely pinpoint an object discovered by the large detectors. Again, it didn’t take long after that before the metal detectors were improved and now many of them can even alert you to the type of metal that set off the signal. As I have said in the past, I tried my hand a couple of times at metal detecting and found a pole and street sign buried under the ground. This was not my idea of treasure. Gary, the metal detection guy on the television program The Curse of Oak Island, is one very enthusiastic man. Even when he finds the smallest of objects such as an old nail or something like that he sure gets excited. Sometimes however things can be found without detection of this type. The important thing is what is found, not so much how it was found, most of the time. Sometimes mother nature decides to show us things which have been buried for a very long time. She sends a storm of some type our way with one of the results being the uncovering of debris. In one case Hurricane Nicole hit the Daytona Beach area and revealed part of a 19th century ship which was buried. Not everything found is this dramatic, but sometimes the object is even more so, because it is considered treasure, ancient treasure. When we talk about objects being found by people metal detecting on a beach, most found objects are quite ordinary. Unfortunately for the metal detection people, a lot of bottle caps and pull tabs are also setting off those detectors and one might be able to say these are the most common finds on beaches and in parks. A woman was walking on the beach by Monterey Bay when she found something very unusual. Normally most people wouldn’t pick up a tooth they found, but this was a different kettle of fish, this tooth was very different. The tooth was said to be a foot long and looked very strange. It turned out to be the molar of a Mastodon. One has to wonder why it was in a beach area. Sometimes the ocean itself seems to contribute to the strange things found on beaches. A mysterious round sphere was found on a beach in Japan and no one knows what it is. It is metal, it has two handles and is about 1.5 meters in diameter. It was initially thought it might be a mine, but contains no explosives. Experts as of this writing are still trying to figure out what it is. MIT has developed a robotic machine called a finger which can dig for objects on the beach and elsewhere. It can dig through any granular material. It is hoped sometime in the future it can be mounted on a robotic arm. This would be handy. If you lost something at the beach you could return with your friendly robot and he might be able to find it for you using his robotic finger digger. Sometimes, unfortunately, something very dangerous is found after digging. There are countries in this world that have many mines and unexploded bombs just waiting for some unsuspecting person to either step on them, or try and dig them up. There are different ways to detect objects under the ground and one way is to use vibrations from explosions. A map of an area can actually be made showing the suspected objects in the ground, if the explosives are placed correctly. Ground penetrating radar can also be used to detect soil which has been tampered with and areas which look like they might have objects in them and voids. Many objects found on beaches do not have a metal component. Probably the most common ones are plastic objects which got covered by the sand. Plastic toys seem to get found on a lot of beaches. That is understandable, as kids bring them there. All kinds of other plastic things are found. I imagine a lot of plastic bottles should also be on the list. People drop coins all the time and either can’t find them, or do not know they fell. Think about this, people have been dropping coins for thousands of years. Another thing to think about is there were no banks in ancient times so people buried their money and sometimes died before retrieving it. Then there were the burials and sometimes some very valuable object made of gold and silver were buried with them. In some tombs even precious stones were buried with the dead. There is still a lot out there to be found and it is not only on land but extends out into the oceans. There are plenty of people looking for treasure in the oceans of the world and others who just come across things by accident. It seems one of the most exciting finds is gold and silver coins, but others could turn out to be valuable to collectors. Some of the metal stuff being found as to do with cans, can tops, all sorts of old metal hardware and pieces of things. Lots of times metal detectors find U.S. coins. Most of the time they are quite ordinary, but sometimes some very unusual coins are found which shouldn’t be there. A Viking coin know as the Maine Penny, was said to prove Vikings came to Maine. The coin was minted between 1067 and 1093 A.D. during the reign of Olaf Kyrre, King of Norway. It was discovered in Maine in 1957. It was found on an archaeological site and was discovered by an amateur archaeologist named Guy Mellgren. Speaking about Vikings, a man named Derek McLennan found something which became known as the Galloway Hoard in 2014, in Scotland. I guess it helps to do your metal detecting in an ancient country. The hoard was over 1,000 years old and had more than 100 items. It is said to be the greatest find in the United Kingdom in over 100 years. Some of the objects were a silver cross, many gold objects, and a silver cup engraved with animals and dates which came from the Holy Roman Empire. It just goes to show there are still interesting and maybe valuable things to be found.
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