Don't listen to the narrow minded nay sayers who can't think outside the box that public school system put them. in
Red J-Cash: Love your posts
We have a farmer's ag field (leaf vegetables) here in CA (probably been under continuous cultivation since the 1880s), that we hunt because it was the site of a contact-era Indian rancheria. And, of course, we are looking for reales, buttons, etc.... of the 1790s to 1820s era.
But every once in awhile, over this 60-ish acres, yes .... an occasional silver washington, or wheatie, or buffalo or clad dime has surfaced. Those, of course, are nuisance finds and obviously not what we're looking for
And one day, after years of working this site, I sat down and mentally calculated the amount of "random field worker losses" we'd pulled over the years. And I can honestly say, that if THOSE were someone's goal (ie.: if the earlier history had not gone on there), then it would have been a very poor use of their time (Eg.: 30 hrs. for a wheatie, etc....) .
Yes, the east coast has more history, but , here's another example:
At the Virginia NDL hunt that just finished up, there were 600 acres. Of which it has been under continuous cultivation since maybe even colonial times (certainly by the CW era). And let me assure you: There were VAST areas , of that 600 acres of fallow corn fields, that had UTTERLY nothing in them (except an occasional aluminum can glob by a tractor driver who chucked his soda can out of the window). The hunters all ended up gravitating to the zones where suspected CW front line sentry camps had been. And to several cellar-hole home-site portions that had been in the 600 acres. Once you got out of these zones (into "random furrowed ag"), it was quite sterile indeed.
So ... as you can see, even on the east coast, they will study history, and don't simply just go to "any random field".
