funkman
Bronze Member
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2006
- Messages
- 1,062
- Reaction score
- 23
- Golden Thread
- 0
- Location
- Middletown, NY
- Detector(s) used
- AT Pro & Ace 250
- #1
Thread Owner
To all you seasoned veterans of this interesting and fascinating hobby...
I went to my site yesterday afternoon and let my son wander off with the metal detector while I went to the trash pit where I found many shards of glass, pottery, and shoe leather as well as some metal objects (shoe horn for instance). ANyway I brought the little gardening rake, gardening trowel, and a bigger shovel and started clearing some of the area and started digging. I started using the little rake (whatever the three pronged thing gardeners use is called) to scrape some of the dirt off the surface and was bringing up broken glass and such. There were still good sized rocks under the surface. Is this normal for a trash pit? I wanted to get right into using the big shovel but was afraid that I would break some items in my quest to dig deeper than the surface. Just so you know this was a trash pit I found while metal detecting. It was a pile of rocks maybe 3-4 feet in diameter and when I cleared out the rocks that is when I found the metallic objects my detector said was there. Also were the glass and shoe leather.
Anyway that stuff was pretty much a couple inches below the surface and like I said, I am hesitant about really digging since I don't know what to do or what I should be doing. When you all dig a pit or dump, do you just get to work with the big shovels and say the heck with it in case you break something? How do you find the bottles that are there when you are shoveling? Do you scrape first the surface , or sides of a hole, and just remove the loose dirt that you scraped off? Just trying to get a better feel on what I should be doing in my quest to find complete bottles and pottery in what I beleive to be a trash pit.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Funkman
I went to my site yesterday afternoon and let my son wander off with the metal detector while I went to the trash pit where I found many shards of glass, pottery, and shoe leather as well as some metal objects (shoe horn for instance). ANyway I brought the little gardening rake, gardening trowel, and a bigger shovel and started clearing some of the area and started digging. I started using the little rake (whatever the three pronged thing gardeners use is called) to scrape some of the dirt off the surface and was bringing up broken glass and such. There were still good sized rocks under the surface. Is this normal for a trash pit? I wanted to get right into using the big shovel but was afraid that I would break some items in my quest to dig deeper than the surface. Just so you know this was a trash pit I found while metal detecting. It was a pile of rocks maybe 3-4 feet in diameter and when I cleared out the rocks that is when I found the metallic objects my detector said was there. Also were the glass and shoe leather.
Anyway that stuff was pretty much a couple inches below the surface and like I said, I am hesitant about really digging since I don't know what to do or what I should be doing. When you all dig a pit or dump, do you just get to work with the big shovels and say the heck with it in case you break something? How do you find the bottles that are there when you are shoveling? Do you scrape first the surface , or sides of a hole, and just remove the loose dirt that you scraped off? Just trying to get a better feel on what I should be doing in my quest to find complete bottles and pottery in what I beleive to be a trash pit.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Funkman
