Coin Cache Recovery
Canvassing the dirt for loose coins
We carefully used a knife to cut the cache out and hand-picked all remaining coins that we could see.
Then we widened the hole and scanned every dirt load taken out of it until the coins stopped appearing.
We unearthed a total of 350 silver "hammereds" that day! But we knew that there were probably more deep coins left around.
A Treasure Hunter's Dream!
We were truly excited while we were sorting out the coins by their face value. We probably acted like little kids that discovered something cool! As Vasily and I had already had similar experiences before, we took it easy. But Andrei, who would recently just begun metal detecting, freaked out completely and could not even go to work next day. Finally, after an hour, we sorted out the coins, counted them, split the cache in three equal parts, shook hands, and parted.
On the picture below, there is an iron object lying next to the plastic container with silver coins. It was situated 15" deep and above the buried cache before we dug it up while deepening the hole. It was so rusty that it was hard to say if it was either the tractor's part or… a door bolt from 16th century. But it could explain why no one had discovered the cache before us. It could be so called a "Cache Protector" - usually a padlock that was placed above the hidden treasure by a superstitious burier with intention of protecting the cache from being discovered by others. It looked like that the "cache protector" had successfully carried out its task for 500+ years… until we came over. Made of iron, it masked the signal of the cache from all metal detectors that had passed over!
A Cache and Its "Protector"
Was it pure luck? Did the Gods of Metal Detecting finally reward us for many "fruitless" hours that we spent treasure hunting? Or, maybe, our intuition, perseverance, patience, and experience made us successful? It did not really matter. I only wished a lucky day like this would happen more often!
I am Holding It!
DAY 3
The news about cache discovery spread inside the metal detecting community
as fast as the jungle fire. Within next three days, a crowd of members from
the St. Petersburg Treasure Hunting Club visited the site and literally
turned over the soil with their shovels all around the "hot spot".
Even a few bore pits were dug. Some treasure hunters were lucky to recover
a dozen of hard-to-detect coins. We did not want to participate in madness
and just stayed away for a few days.
After the "Silver Rush" quietened down, my partner Forrest and I decided to revisit the site and search it with 7-1/4" coils in order to recover the tinniest "fish scales", only 3-4 mm in diameter, of the smallest face value - "Polushka." No one from all treasure hunters I knew had found one. Only a few metal detectors, including Minelabs, with small coils can recover such coins. We also decided to use the most (or the only) productive method of "fishing out" the elusive "fish scales." The method is described in "Tips" section of this web site.
Upon our arrival at the location late at night, we did not go to sleep but went straight to work instead: we turned our head-lamps on and started digging a prospect-hole next to the spot of cache discovery. Our method worked just fine: within first 10 minutes of scanning the dirt with small coil, I netted a smallest hammered coin from that era, 1 Polushka! Its diameter was only 3.5 mm.
1533-1584 1 Polushka (Minted During the Rule of Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible"))
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