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The Best Metal Detectors
For most of us, the fantasy of finding buried treasure faded away along with other childhood passions, like making it into the Guinness World Records for building the world’s largest pillow fort. But it doesn’t have to. With the right metal detector, a little patience, and some knowledge of history, anyone can dig up centuries-old jewelry and long-lost coins (or at least have a better chance of finding a lost earring in the grass). Of course, some locations are better suited for metal detecting than others. “There is a very big difference between detecting in Europe and detecting in the United States,” says Branko Barisic, a Croatian detectorist (yes, that is the actual term for it) who posts about his finds, including a huge Roman coin depicting Alexander Severus on his Instagram page Metal Detecting Croatia. “Most of the coins I see people find with detectors in America are a few hundred years old, but in Europe, it’s common to find Roman coins that are 2,000 years old,” he says.Get more news about Metal Detector,you can vist our website!
That’s not to say that there’s no cool stuff to uncover stateside, too. Brad Martin of Green Mountain Metal Detecting has a YouTube channel highlighting some of his best finds, including some Spanish gold in the mountains of Vermont. The choice of tools, he says, is important. Someone searching for gold jewelry on a saltwater beach should choose a different machine than someone searching for old coins in a park. “My advice is to visit a local hobby shop and have a chat, they will know what’s best for your area.” Before you do that, and to help get you acquainted with the top metal detectors on the market right now (some of which can handle all types of terrain), we asked Barisic, Martin, and five other experienced detectorists from the United States and Europe about the metal detectors they started out using and what they use now. They also suggested other gear you’ll need to get your treasure out of the dirt and home safely.
According to Martin, the more expensive the machine, the more it can discriminate between trash and treasure. While you shouldn’t spend thousands on your first metal detector, you don’t want to go too cheap either. Martin says “spending more than $150 from well-known brands like Garrett, XP, Minelab, and Fisher will save a lot of time and disappointment in the field.” For Barisic, the location is even more important than the fanciness of your detector. “In great locations, you can find amazing things with a cheap metal detector, but in a bad location, even with the best detector in the world, you’ll find nothing.” Both Chambers and Martin say the best spots are those where the ground has remained relatively undisturbed for a long period of time. “Crop fields are plowed and turned, making some items too deep to detect,” says Martin. Many detectorists look at old maps to find the ruins of old homes or ask permission to look for treasure at old houses about to be demolished.
But before you go hunting for artifacts, you might want to think about where you are digging and whether it is disturbing a site that could otherwise be preserved. “There is a tense relationship between metal detectorists and archaeologists,” says Matthew Reeves, director of archaeology at James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia. That tension stems from incidents of theft and destruction of historic sites throughout Europe and the U.S. But there are also relationships where the two are cooperating. Reeves works with metal detectorists at Montpelier to recover and preserve the stories of the enslaved Americans who lived and labored on the 2,650-acre plantation. Before ever putting shovel to the ground, they carefully survey the land looking for evidence (usually a concentration of nails) of labor sites. If not properly handled and recorded, these sites and the stories of the people who labored there would be lost both to their descendants and to the world.
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