Bill D. (VA)
Silver Member
Gorgeous gilted colonial buckle from Saturday's hunt.
I got an invite from my friend Joey to join him for a hunt at an early site he had just recently acquired permission at. This was quite an early site, and Joey provided a nice historical summary that you can read about in his recent post. We started out in the large field that contained the remains of the original home, but things were rather slow. I was surprised that even going slow in the heavy iron produced little in the way of results. But I did end up with one nice find - a large, gilted colonial frame buckle. I could not find it in my buckle reference book, but it probably dates to around the mid-1700s. A little later we decided to venture down to the waters edge and check out the marshy area during low tide. Joey told me the owner (or his relative?) had eyeballed a nearly intact black glass bottle there a while back so I thought it was worth a look. But it was very rough going as you can see from the pic below. Unfortunately I was unable to make any recoveries. At that point we decided to try and find a trash pit as that was one of our main objectives of the hunt. Based on Joey's great research we had a real good idea of where the kitchen structure once stood, and that was the best place to look as trash was nearly always dumped in a low area nearby. As soon as we started probing on the slope close to the kitchen site we hit paydirt. We decided to dig a small test hole about 2 ft wide, and started getting down to the use layer at about the 2 ft level, and it continued down another 1.5 - 2.0 ft or so. As Joey's post shows, we got a large quantity of artifacts from that one small spot including many black glass bottle parts, mid-1700s chamberpot shards, pipe stems, brick, bones, oyster shells and all the usual 18th century trash pit finds. That's Joey doing some sifting in the pic below. After filling in the hole we did some probing in the vicinity to determine the approximate size of the trash pit, and it appears to be fairly large (maybe 50x25 ft). So the opportunity exists to get into a large, extensive pile of early artifacts there. And I love our chances for finding bottle seals at this site since this was the home of a prominent person who likely did a lot of entertainment. After a little more detecting in the field and looking for the ice house, we stumbled across a bonus pit that Mr. Groundhog had already found for us. There was a pile of dirt on a downslope at the edge of some dense vegetation that I could see contained oyster shells and brick. But upon closer inspection we realized the pile was loaded with black glass bottle parts, and it was located right next to a groundhog hole. We spent a while digging in that area without any significant recoveries, and had to cut things short due to it getting late and us both being worn out from a full day's work. Certainly hope we have the opportunity to get back in there and do some more serious digging in the near future. Thanks again Joey - I had a blast.
I got an invite from my friend Joey to join him for a hunt at an early site he had just recently acquired permission at. This was quite an early site, and Joey provided a nice historical summary that you can read about in his recent post. We started out in the large field that contained the remains of the original home, but things were rather slow. I was surprised that even going slow in the heavy iron produced little in the way of results. But I did end up with one nice find - a large, gilted colonial frame buckle. I could not find it in my buckle reference book, but it probably dates to around the mid-1700s. A little later we decided to venture down to the waters edge and check out the marshy area during low tide. Joey told me the owner (or his relative?) had eyeballed a nearly intact black glass bottle there a while back so I thought it was worth a look. But it was very rough going as you can see from the pic below. Unfortunately I was unable to make any recoveries. At that point we decided to try and find a trash pit as that was one of our main objectives of the hunt. Based on Joey's great research we had a real good idea of where the kitchen structure once stood, and that was the best place to look as trash was nearly always dumped in a low area nearby. As soon as we started probing on the slope close to the kitchen site we hit paydirt. We decided to dig a small test hole about 2 ft wide, and started getting down to the use layer at about the 2 ft level, and it continued down another 1.5 - 2.0 ft or so. As Joey's post shows, we got a large quantity of artifacts from that one small spot including many black glass bottle parts, mid-1700s chamberpot shards, pipe stems, brick, bones, oyster shells and all the usual 18th century trash pit finds. That's Joey doing some sifting in the pic below. After filling in the hole we did some probing in the vicinity to determine the approximate size of the trash pit, and it appears to be fairly large (maybe 50x25 ft). So the opportunity exists to get into a large, extensive pile of early artifacts there. And I love our chances for finding bottle seals at this site since this was the home of a prominent person who likely did a lot of entertainment. After a little more detecting in the field and looking for the ice house, we stumbled across a bonus pit that Mr. Groundhog had already found for us. There was a pile of dirt on a downslope at the edge of some dense vegetation that I could see contained oyster shells and brick. But upon closer inspection we realized the pile was loaded with black glass bottle parts, and it was located right next to a groundhog hole. We spent a while digging in that area without any significant recoveries, and had to cut things short due to it getting late and us both being worn out from a full day's work. Certainly hope we have the opportunity to get back in there and do some more serious digging in the near future. Thanks again Joey - I had a blast.
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