Monday, September 8, 2014

Indiana Sandy and The Secret of the Lost Artifacts

Hullo! Indiana Bear here, reporting to you from my latest dig in the wilds of Canada (my backyard). Today I am supervising an excavation for the purposes of building a potting bench area. This excavation is located near the deck and promises to be quite lucrative in the artifacts department.

It didn't take beary long before my helper had uncovered the first two artifacts. Beary interesting...

Let me see... it is made out of metal, perhaps brass.

And... it appears to have a hollow top - my guess would be an ancient vase from the last century, circa 1990s... commonly referred to as The Pre-Millenial Era. Not all that rare, but interesting none-the-less.

Next up... a beary oxidized (i.e. rusted, but oxidized sounds better) piece of chain. The links are quite small and I am leaning towards it being a dog chain.

And then a tiny piece of plastic, marked Dixie. Clearly a Dixie cup - these are beary common and could be from any era.

This is a great dig location!! After a while, I could bearly keep up with my helper...

See!!! Soooo... that is a clear plastic glove on the left (it looks beary... yucky). And if you look closely at the rusty chain bits... you'll see there is indeed a dog latch near the bottom.

So... what else do we have... several two soldiers, a bit of shell, some glass, a nail, a pop can top, a toy truck wheel and a super cool cats-eye cob marble! Hmmm... Mama thinks they are called cobs... they are the big ones, not the regular marble sized ones... Are they called cobs? Anyhow... they could be from the Middle Ages of the past century to the Pre-Millenial. Hard to say...

Next up.... some strips of metal and...

A bit of a door latch plate, another soldier, a paintbrush and a nickel!!! This has been a beary cool dig but it is getting hard for me to speculate as to the habits of the previous inhabitants. Initially I thought it was a cowboy plumber with kids... now I would say a cowboy plumber with kids and a dog and a wife who liked to gardening and paint. Whew!

6 comments:

  1. You didn't find any buried large pots of honey did you? Jerry seems to think they might be his...but Ben just rolls his eyes at that thought, so they may not belong to Jerry.

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    1. Nope, although that does make the hunt all the more interesting!

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  2. Are you going to send the items to the lab UBC for further inspection and carbon dating?

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    1. I suppose I could but I think they really like to have a map of how things were positioned and which came in which layer and all sorts of finicky details. I do think that a metal detector would make an awesome Christmas present for a little Indiana Sandy Bear!

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  3. Great adventure Sandy! That's quite a haul of buried artifacts for such a small area. The most we have ever found here in a couple of flower beds is a soldier or two, a Lego, a penny, nail a plastic pony bead. We also found a missing bus pass that belonged to a high school girl that used to live here back when cabinets were moved in the kitchen. Guess that technically doesn't count, as it didn't come from a dig.

    Jerry, you bury your hunny? Do you ever find any left when you go back for it? I'd think it would draw so many ants and they would eat it all.

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    1. We found a packet of ancient marigold seeds behind the baseboards... from the 1980s... we planted them but they didn't do anything.

      I don't know about burying honey... it seems like the wild honey bees might find it... or the wild bears!

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