Super site your scooping up there Toasted !
It does seem wonderfully unusual that you are finding such small cut pieces of silver there. It could be that it was the smaller pieces that tended to be lost, which is resulting in the smaller pieces now tending to be found? I suspect that you could be finding payments made to the boys, for their efforts in rolling all those heavy hogs heads of tobacco to the dock for shipment. With an economy at that time based around tobacco, the shoreline and local docks/wharfs were logical places for the leaf to be converted to hard specie. I can imagine a dozen local planters, their families & workers all gathered there on the shoreline, there crop having been transported and staged there over the previous days and weeks, waiting for the few busy days when their crop could be sold for coins or notes, or traded for other goods that may have just arrived there via boat.
Keep hitting it hard and often, there may be plenty more there to recover.
