Bill D. (VA)
Silver Member
Joey and I went back to the colonial site where we’ve been doing quite a bit of pit digging recently as well as some surface hunting. I started out the day by making the difficult trek through the tall marsh reeds and muck to get down to the river’s edge to see what I could eyeball at low tide. The property manager had told us that not too long ago he found a nearly intact black glass bottle in the low tide mud, and that got us excited. I did find 3 black glass bases including one from a large and early onion bottle, but that was it. We’re definitely going to have to keep rechecking that spot. We then hit the pits, and started out digging huge holes next to where we left off last time in an area that probed out nicely. But the glass and pottery coming from this particular spot appears to be much later than the mid 1600s original occupancy date for this site. The tapered lip design on the black glass bottle spouts, the bore diameter of the pipe stems, and the style of most of the pottery made it obvious this part of the pit most likely dated from the late 1700s to possibly the very early 1800s. Not exactly what we were looking for, but we still had a lot of fun not to mention getting a full 6 hour extreme workout. From this area I dug a number of nice looking blue and white shards for what I thought might be from a single Chinese porcelain platter, but after cleaning I realized the pieces represented several different items. But that’s just par for the course with these (or any) pits. I also dug this large brass decorative piece from the pit and have no idea what it was used for. We took a break in the middle of the pit dig to stretch our backs and do a little detecting in the adjacent field, but the finds were few. I had one great sounding, deep signal that turned out to be a huge and slightly concave piece of brass with a large hole in the center. Not sure what that was either. But the real heartbreaker of the day was a sweet, high toned signal that I was sure was going to be a colonial coin. When I finally pulled it out from 10-12” down I could see that gorgeous silver non-reeded edge exposed and I was sure I had an awesome early coin. I can’t begin to tell you how upset I was to find out it was just one of those aluminum cracker jack presidential tokens from the 1930s. But that will not deter me from wanting to come back and give it another shot, which will hopefully be soon.
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