Midden-marauder
Sr. Member
- Dec 10, 2023
- 377
- 639
I bet you guys thought I had buggered off hmm? You almost had the eccentric out of your hair but not so fast.
My frustrations with relic hunting won out, I'm really, REALLY not interested in collecting trash, coins, artifacts and rusty pieces of what have you. I don't have space for all that junk nor indeed the desire to spend hours out in the sticks digging for things I'm gonna instantly regret digging due to lack of collectible value or historical context.
Rather, my happy medium is studying old sites, potentially locating artifacts, studying and documenting details but mostly just to put those finds right back in the ground where I found them, they're junk, worthless junk but they may have information to impart about a site. Photos, internet searches and developed personal knowledge about history are what I take away, not objects. Oh, and, no, this is not a cultural theft thing, I just don't need someone's long forgotten clutter laying about for me to ultimately forget or lose.
Anyway.....
So using various mapping apps is how I locate spots of interest and I'll boast that I have a Hawks eye looking at sat and aerial maps. That's how I located the place I was in yesterday. Initially I had a theory that the site was a pueblito based on deep research of the area and the earthworks visible from the air led me to this spot. I was out there ready to work a loose grid of the site using magnetic survey but once I arrived at the spot it became apparent that this was no pueblito from the 1300s, likewise it became apparent that any sort of magnetic survey was going to be largely useless due to the underlying geology which I'll touch on shortly. This place was built post 1900 based on the sparse iron surface artifacts found. The site consists of a number of features, the most evident was the remains of some structure on a graded earthen platform. There was an evenly spaced row of ground level concrete pylons with rebar sticking up out of them, 4 wide by 9 long. Due to dense foliage I was unable to get a useful measurement using a surveyors wheel but the rough guestimate is that whatever had stood there was about 20 feet wide by perhaps a hundred feet long give or take. The feature is arranged at a NNW by SSE axis.
A nearby large pile of rather old looking boards indicated that much of whatever had been there was constructed of wood. Surface artifacts examined were sparse, a couple round nails, some old wire and a few rusty washers. I attempted to grid the site with the magnetometer to find additional features but it was challenging. The brush on the ground and cacti was difficult to navigate but even worse was the underlying lithology: granite, Sandia granite specifically which made reliable detection of anything an utter waste of time, the granite there is pretty powerfully magnetic and there's massive chunks and dikes all about the place in addition to loose pieces scattered around. Some of it was sufficiently magnetic to be impossible to distinguish from metal objects, the ground was very busy all throughout the area but essentially none of the data being collected could be trusted, I was picking up large igneous deposits probably 8 or 9 feet below me with very large and high intensity magnetic fields. This is the equivalent to "mineralized" ground some metal detectorists complain about. Indeed, so magnetic was the weathered granitic soils that I was able to detect rodent dens in the ground which under other circumstances would be largely impossible. Interesting lesson in geology but otherwise totally useless. The area in question sports at least 4 to 5 separate ruined structures dating from the 12-1300s up to the 1960s only two of which I've fully explored now. The pueblito I'm seeking is likely going to be hard to nail down, no magnetic survey can help in that area so that's out, I got my eyes and a bunch of maps to play with. In any case I will probably attempt the metal detector at the latest identified site, not to collect "priceless" relics of which I'm rather sure none exist but to try to find trash or possibly coins in an attempt to establish some kind of date range and function. Right now the best I have is that the place is after 1900, probably 1940s honestly, there was a lot of ranch land here and the newly found feature may be an aspect of that. I was able to deduce, despite bad ground conditions that no meaningful infrastructure is associated with this site, no water or utilities ever went to the place. My current assumption is that it's not an old house or dwelling place. If folks want coordinates I can provide them but you gotta let me finish my work there first, I just wanna know the history, I don't want the relics, unless it's something VERY unusual I have zero interest in taking stuff from the site, it's probably mid 1900s junk. In any case here's a few pics some were too big to upload but you get the point, there is a lot to say based on my little foot survey of the place but more information is required. I'm here for the history, not the relics gang. This is what I do now, this is where it's led me, I'm less of a relic hunter and more of an archaeologist I guess, that's what holds my attention. If I find anything worth reporting there I will, there's another expedition pending at some point in the future to hit it with the MD and see if it fares better amid the iron rich rocks than the mag did.
My frustrations with relic hunting won out, I'm really, REALLY not interested in collecting trash, coins, artifacts and rusty pieces of what have you. I don't have space for all that junk nor indeed the desire to spend hours out in the sticks digging for things I'm gonna instantly regret digging due to lack of collectible value or historical context.
Rather, my happy medium is studying old sites, potentially locating artifacts, studying and documenting details but mostly just to put those finds right back in the ground where I found them, they're junk, worthless junk but they may have information to impart about a site. Photos, internet searches and developed personal knowledge about history are what I take away, not objects. Oh, and, no, this is not a cultural theft thing, I just don't need someone's long forgotten clutter laying about for me to ultimately forget or lose.
Anyway.....
So using various mapping apps is how I locate spots of interest and I'll boast that I have a Hawks eye looking at sat and aerial maps. That's how I located the place I was in yesterday. Initially I had a theory that the site was a pueblito based on deep research of the area and the earthworks visible from the air led me to this spot. I was out there ready to work a loose grid of the site using magnetic survey but once I arrived at the spot it became apparent that this was no pueblito from the 1300s, likewise it became apparent that any sort of magnetic survey was going to be largely useless due to the underlying geology which I'll touch on shortly. This place was built post 1900 based on the sparse iron surface artifacts found. The site consists of a number of features, the most evident was the remains of some structure on a graded earthen platform. There was an evenly spaced row of ground level concrete pylons with rebar sticking up out of them, 4 wide by 9 long. Due to dense foliage I was unable to get a useful measurement using a surveyors wheel but the rough guestimate is that whatever had stood there was about 20 feet wide by perhaps a hundred feet long give or take. The feature is arranged at a NNW by SSE axis.
A nearby large pile of rather old looking boards indicated that much of whatever had been there was constructed of wood. Surface artifacts examined were sparse, a couple round nails, some old wire and a few rusty washers. I attempted to grid the site with the magnetometer to find additional features but it was challenging. The brush on the ground and cacti was difficult to navigate but even worse was the underlying lithology: granite, Sandia granite specifically which made reliable detection of anything an utter waste of time, the granite there is pretty powerfully magnetic and there's massive chunks and dikes all about the place in addition to loose pieces scattered around. Some of it was sufficiently magnetic to be impossible to distinguish from metal objects, the ground was very busy all throughout the area but essentially none of the data being collected could be trusted, I was picking up large igneous deposits probably 8 or 9 feet below me with very large and high intensity magnetic fields. This is the equivalent to "mineralized" ground some metal detectorists complain about. Indeed, so magnetic was the weathered granitic soils that I was able to detect rodent dens in the ground which under other circumstances would be largely impossible. Interesting lesson in geology but otherwise totally useless. The area in question sports at least 4 to 5 separate ruined structures dating from the 12-1300s up to the 1960s only two of which I've fully explored now. The pueblito I'm seeking is likely going to be hard to nail down, no magnetic survey can help in that area so that's out, I got my eyes and a bunch of maps to play with. In any case I will probably attempt the metal detector at the latest identified site, not to collect "priceless" relics of which I'm rather sure none exist but to try to find trash or possibly coins in an attempt to establish some kind of date range and function. Right now the best I have is that the place is after 1900, probably 1940s honestly, there was a lot of ranch land here and the newly found feature may be an aspect of that. I was able to deduce, despite bad ground conditions that no meaningful infrastructure is associated with this site, no water or utilities ever went to the place. My current assumption is that it's not an old house or dwelling place. If folks want coordinates I can provide them but you gotta let me finish my work there first, I just wanna know the history, I don't want the relics, unless it's something VERY unusual I have zero interest in taking stuff from the site, it's probably mid 1900s junk. In any case here's a few pics some were too big to upload but you get the point, there is a lot to say based on my little foot survey of the place but more information is required. I'm here for the history, not the relics gang. This is what I do now, this is where it's led me, I'm less of a relic hunter and more of an archaeologist I guess, that's what holds my attention. If I find anything worth reporting there I will, there's another expedition pending at some point in the future to hit it with the MD and see if it fares better amid the iron rich rocks than the mag did.
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