16th Century Silver Coins Hoard Discovery In St. Petersburg Region, Russia
Digging Up Sweden Coins and Early Russian Hammered Coins - Wire Money
To my surprise, the 17th century copper swedish coins, started "popping up," and they are usually hard to miss with any metal detector employed!
1636 ¼ Ore, Minted Under the Rule of Queen Christina
The next signal sounded very unusual by its tone. I knew I had heard that signal before (read more about it in my story on Metal Detecting at the Kozheritsy Village Site). It was weak and soft and was also changing its intensity as I repositioned the 10.5" coil at 90 degrees angle. I pinpointed the target and started digging it up. After I pulled the dirt plug out, I could not get any signal either from the plug nor from the hole.
Usually, iron targets of a small or medium size, such as nails or tool fragments, would behave that way after the "Halo Effect" would be destroyed by digging. In scientific terms, the Halo Effect is a conductive increase in target size as seen by the metal detector's electromagnetic field.
In simple words, the detector "reads" an iron target as a nonferrous object of high conductivity, i.e. the object made of copper or silver. The effect is caused by excessive target oxidation permeating the soil directly surrounding the target. The Halo Effect is associated with long term burial or highly acidic soils.
The Halo Effect always disappears upon digging up the iron target, and if the detector's discrimination is set up on rejecting iron, the target's signal is not heard any more. The target's signal disappears because the soil surrounding the target has been disturbed, and the metal detector does not "see" the iron object of low conductivity. In All Metal Mode, when iron is accepted, the "silver" or high-pitch tone of a signal changes to low-pitch tone or "iron" upon digging up the target.
But this target did not sound like iron in the beginning. I flipped the plug and scanned its top with coil. Now I got a signal back! I realized that a target was initially near the surface. Due to its small size, the target gave me a weak signal which made me assume that the target was buried deep. I carefully sliced the top 2 inches off the plug and investigated the piece. Unexpectedly a tiny silver coin appeared!
Because of its oval shape, I knew right away that it was so called "Wire Money" type of early Russian coins. To make such coin, a piece of silver wire was cut off at certain length and hammered flat, then, a design was hammered on both sides. These coins had earned a slang word "Fish Scales" because of their small size and thinness. Among Russian treasure hunters, such coins are considered the toughest ones to detect.
1533-1584 1 Kopek Minted Under the Rule of "Ivan The Terrible"
Then I Dug Out Another "Fish Scale"...
And Another...
As soon as Vasily came to my "hot" spot, he just eyeballed two "hammereds" lying right on the surface! Besides pure joy expressed on his face, a true surprise was also shown: "How these coins could be missed by previous treasure hunters?! The field had not been plowed for at least a couple of years!"
A Silver Coin Would Make Any Treasure Hunter Happy!
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