I wear the term "relic hunter" like a badge of honour, like it's something I graduated from.
You see, as a coin hunter, I spent years of discriminating targets and sites. They build fancy detectors for coin hunters because they hate digging junk and want to cherry pick coins only.
They will find copper and silver relics because of digging high tones in the coin range. Never dug anything in the ferrous range and would be sick to my stomach if I saw rust in the hole!
A beach hunter will go to the beach and dig everything because they know that gold falls in the pull tab/foil range and a fine chain could even be close to the ferrous range.
Hopefully, there's less junk at the beach than most green spaces and one will put in the work to strike gold.
A beach hunter uses way less discrimination than a coin hunter and is willing to dig junk more frequently.
A relic hunter has a quest to dig at least all non-ferrous at their sites because they know that buttons, badges, and a wide range of artifacts fall below the coin range.
They use the same work ethic as a beach hunter digging a lot of junk but are content as long as the junk is old and know a nice keeper or two will come out of those junk signals.
A relic hunter will still easily dig up coins and jewellery if they are present and will even dig those iffy signals, knowing it could be non-ferrous mixed with iron.
At really old sites, I will dig larger ferrous signals and if the soil is kind, even dig up beautiful rose-head nails!
I have converted coin hunters into relic hunters after they saw the crazy axes, knives, and gun parts that are ferrous coming out of the soil.
A relic hunter also has trained eyes and can spend hours eye-balling metal finds where they dumped garbage long ago or finding non-metal artifacts like prehistoric stone implements in fields and shorelines.
Arrow head hunters are more likely "artifact hunters" than relic hunters but I am both and use the relic hunter title but I spend a lot of time coin hunting as well.
If you know anyone here that gets a permit to detect historic sites and spend hours graphing soil stratospheres, flagging finds only to excavate in a square, gridding every find slowly and tediously while recording every fish and rodent bone with plant seeds and a few berry pits......Then you could call them an amateur archaeologist.
Everyone has their own idea of what treasure is but we're ALL looking treasure in some form or another, so that makes us all treasure hunters!
