2016 finds - summary

Zot

Winter came early this year, so my detecting year wasn’t much more than 6 months this time.
I got going properly around mid-April and was frozen out by early November.

This is what I got:

Gold:

18k, 1915, 2.70 grams

A good looking ring, even if quite small.
It came from a site I’ve had great success at in the past, but that's dried up almost completely by now.
I’ve obviously missed this one in the past, as I’ve been in the same spot several times before.

18k, 1948, 2.83 grams

1940s (and 1930s) gold rings are scarce finds.
During WWII, gold rings were collected and exchanged for cheap substitute rings to help fund the war effort. To give you an idea of the scale of this, Finland’s total population at the time was about 3.7 million, and about 315,000 gold rings were collected. Taking into account that parts of the population were children and unmarried, this took a substantial share of gold rings out.

After the war, times were lean indeed. Coins were made of iron (I’m yet to find a readable one of those, for obvious reasons), and gold rings were quite the luxury.
This 1948 ring is a good reflection of its time. It’s large in diameter, but really skinny. Earlier (1910s/20s) 18k rings of comparable diameter I’ve found have been in the 6-8 gram range.

Speaking of those substitute rings I mentioned, I finally got one of them this year (my first).
That’s quite weird actually, given how many of them were around.

Anyway, here it is:

To finish up the gold category, the year also yielded 8.2 grams of gold from sluicing:

Silver jewelry:
I generally don’t find very much silver jewelry, so this is actually a pretty good year for me.
Four rings (one with stone), an earring, and a cross.

Coins:
I accumulate coins in this box, move everything into other boxes/jars at the end of the year, and start fresh the following year. Some coins end up in 2x2s over the course of the year. These include some of the better coins, and ones that happen to fill gaps in my dug collection or are “condition upgrades”.

No old coins this year. The oldest ones are about 10 coins from the 1860s and 70s.
I was planning to do some “old stuff” detecting late in the year, but winter came early and robbed me of a month or so.

There are about 500 coins in total, which is a fairly typical result for me.
While I did a lot of water detecting, most of it was in places that can yield something good but aren’t very productive in terms of number of coins.
Many times I was getting just 1-2 coins per hour.

Here’s a closer look at a few:

Finnish 10 Markkaa, 1967
35mm, 24g, 0.900 silver

A big coin, and an unusual find as these were struck to be collectibles, not circulating coins.
I’ll almost certainly never find another one.
It’s nothing special, worth melt, but was fun to find. For a moment I thought I’d found a US silver dollar.

With a Lincoln Cent to show size:

Two Shell tokens (brass), ~1970
Icarus & Daedalus, and De Havilland Comet

Both are in pretty good shape. And yes, they really are very different in color.
The yellow one had me going for a moment (“gold coin?!”) when it popped out of the clay, looking just like in the picture

Some misc items to wrap it up

• Fishing lures
• All sorts of ammunition
• Keys (20)
• Lead toys and seals
• Some buttons, copper nails, etc

That’s it!

As usual, I now have plenty of time to figure out where to go next year.
That’s the theory, at least.
What probably will happen (also as usual!) is that I’ll snooze all winter and then start frantically poring over maps and stuff the instant I see a bare patch of ground in the spring!

-Z

ricko

Ah yes.... the winter 'plans'....only to find out that 'Wow... it is spring and time to get out there'...somehow the research did not get done...or not much anyway.... Great finds Zot....Cheers, RickO