DownNDirty
Bronze Member
Friday afternoon I met vmiairpwr07 at the watermelon patch for some harvesting; Darlene was a no show but we made our way through the field anyhow. I scored some nice pottery shards (late 18th and 19th century), a wheatie and a marble but the pickins were mighty slim due to my inexperience in the melon business.
Saturday morning I took one more stroll through the greenery and the highlight ended up being a homemade lead fishing sinker. I left the patch to the skilled harvesters and headed to my reliable colonial site for a few hours of detecting and sifting.
The sifter turned up an interesting pewter button with scrolling around the edge and an odd design in the middle. I also found more 18th century pottery and glass shards, along with 20 pipe stem pieces. The detecting was pretty lean, with the only decent find being another dropped 69 caliber round ball.
Speaking of pipe stems, I took Bill D's advice and measured the bore diameters of the stems I have found at that site (all 242 of them). I applied the formula listed in Ivor Noel Hume's "A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America" to arrive at a mean occupation date of 1758. Very interesting project and good information to know-thanks Bill.
Saturday morning I took one more stroll through the greenery and the highlight ended up being a homemade lead fishing sinker. I left the patch to the skilled harvesters and headed to my reliable colonial site for a few hours of detecting and sifting.
The sifter turned up an interesting pewter button with scrolling around the edge and an odd design in the middle. I also found more 18th century pottery and glass shards, along with 20 pipe stem pieces. The detecting was pretty lean, with the only decent find being another dropped 69 caliber round ball.
Speaking of pipe stems, I took Bill D's advice and measured the bore diameters of the stems I have found at that site (all 242 of them). I applied the formula listed in Ivor Noel Hume's "A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America" to arrive at a mean occupation date of 1758. Very interesting project and good information to know-thanks Bill.
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