THE HUDSON VALLEY EXPLORER PWMD&AS NEWSLETTER SUMMER 2010
Club News - Patterson Hunt
Piterpatter, Piterpatter in Patterson
The piterpatter, piterpatter
of raindrops was the order of the day for the first hunt of 2010 held in Patterson, New York on April 17th. Seventeen members
of the P/W club showed up to do battle with Mother Nature. Thanks to hot coffee provided by Joe Snow
and a modest tent and clean porta potty complements of the land owner the group did enjoy some creature comforts to ward off
the cold and damp environment. The hunting may have been hard but the digging was easy as the nearly rock
free and rain soaked ground willing gave up numerous keepers to those who kept the faith. Clad coins were
everywhere and most in attendance easily covered the $5.00 entrance fee with dimes and quarters. The key
to success, however, was to find a "honey hole" and slowly and deliberately seek out the high tones indicative of
silver lying below. For the few hardy souls who stuck it out till five pm. The reward was also a final
hour or two of detecting in SUNSHINE. A partial list of the more notable recoveries is given below. A
special tip of the rain hood to Ted Izzo and Rich Markert who made a great effort to procure the hunt site for the membership.
If you missed this one you missed a good one. Let's hope
we have the opportunity to return to this site in 2011 and that Mom Nature will be more cooperative . Finds at Patterson: Anthony Attardo: Large
Cent James Verzi: 12K Gold Pin Rich Markert: 2 Rings Roy Roos: 1951S quarter, silver pendant. Conrad
Rasinski: Silver Ring,silver St. Christopher Medal Roger Young: Vermeil earring Don Mayers: Silver ring, silver bear claw charm, silver earring Rich Markert also had a silver pin or broach
Granite Springs Hunt
The spring sprung with 29 members
in attendance on May 15th in Granite Springs, NY. The finds were numerous and are listed below;
Conrad--- 2 colonial
coppers, at least 2 buckles Steve---- 3 colonial coppers, 1 small bell John Dimaio -Barber quarter, 1 colonial copper Mike Hartnet-Small caliber musket
ball Chris Brown-small back marked silver button Russ Bugenson- Large silver button, 2 small flat buttons Rich Markert-small
colonial shoe (knee) buckle (frame only) Rich Farnell- ornate colonial key latch Todd Olson-1 colonial copper Rich Spezzano- colonial
copper Carter Pennington-Mercury dime, ox horn threaded cap, 3 colonial buttons,1 colonial copper Don Mayers- 1 colonial copper, 1
ca. 1820s brass lock cover Tito Arginzoni-large silver ring Pete Kelley-colonial military button Steve Barrett-large thimble This list may be incomplete but there were many great finds.
Treasure In The News
Experts Awed by Anglo-Saxon
Treasure By JOHN F. BURNS Published: September 24, 200
LONDON
— For the jobless man living on welfare who
made the find in an English farmer’s field two months ago, it was the stuff of dreams: a hoard of early Anglo-Saxon
treasure, probably dating from the seventh century and including more than 1,500 pieces of intricately worked gold and silver
whose craftsmanship and historical significance left archaeologists awestruck.
When the discovery
in Staffordshire as announced Thursday, experts described it as one of the most important in British archaeological history.
They said it surpassed the greatest previous discovery of its kind, a royal burial chamber unearthed in 1939 at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. That find shaped scholars’ understanding of the warring Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms of 1,300 years ago that ended up as the
unified kingdom of England.

The new trove includes
items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes: gold items weighing 11 pounds, and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified
by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included
dagger hilts, pieces of scabbards and swords, helmet cheekpieces, Christian crosses and figures of animals like eagles and
fish. The new
trove includes items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes: gold items weighing 11 pounds,
and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England
in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included dagger hilts, pieces of scabbards and swords, helmet cheekpieces, Christian
crosses and figures of animals like eagles and fish. Archaeologists tentatively estimated the value of the trove at 1 million pounds — about $1.6
million — but say it could be many times that. And they took a vicarious pleasure in noting that the discovery was not
the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product of a lone amateur stumbling about with a metal
detector.
“People laugh at metal detectorists,”
Terry Herbert, 55, who made the find, said
Thursday at a news conference at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, where the objects will go on display on Friday for
two weeks. “I’ve had people go past and go, ‘Beep, beep, he’s after pennies.’ Well no, we’re
out there to find this kind of stuff, and it is out there.” items weighing 11 pounds, and
5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the wars that racked Middle England in
the seventh and eighth centuries, they included dagger hilts, pieces of scabbards and swords, helmet cheekpieces, Christian
crosses and figures of animals like eagles and fish. The new trove includes items that one expert in Anglo-Saxon artifacts said brought tears to her eyes:
gold items weighing 11 pounds, and 5.5 pounds of silver. Tentatively identified by some experts as bounty from one of the
wars that racked Middle England in the seventh and eighth centuries, they included dagger hilts, pieces of scabbards and swords,
helmet cheekpieces, Christian crosses and figures of animals like eagles and fish. Archaeologists tentatively estimated the value of the
trove at 1 million pounds — about $1.6 million — but say it could be many times that. And they took a vicarious
pleasure in noting that the discovery was not the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product
of a lone amateur stumbling about with a metal detector.
“People
laugh at metal detectorists,” Terry Herbert, 55, who made the find, said Thursday at a news conference at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, where the objects will
go on display on Friday for two weeks. “I’ve had people go past and go, ‘Beep, beep, he’s after pennies.’
Well no, we’re out there to find this kind of stuff, and it is out there.”

Mr. Herbert
spent 18 years scouring fields and back lots without finding anything more valuable than a piece of an ancient Roman horse
harness. Now, under British laws governing the discovery of ancient treasures, he stands to get half the value of the booty.
When his discovery was announced on Thursday, he kept his wish list modest, saying he would like to use some of his windfall
to buy a bungalow.
Since the July day when his detector picked up traces of the hoard beneath a field in Staffordshire, a Midlands
county that was at the center of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, Mr. Herbert said, he has been seeing piles of
gold in his sleep. Awake, he has quietly celebrated his triumph over all the people who mocked him in the years when a typical
day’s finds amounted to little but scrap.
As for his fellow hunters in the Bloxwich Research
and Metal Detecting Club, he said, “I dread to think what they’ll say when they hear about this.”
He said that on the
day of his discovery he reworked a mantra that he regularly used for good luck. “I have this phrase that I say sometimes
— ‘Spirits of yesterday, take me where the coins appear’ — but on that day I changed ‘coins’
to ‘gold.’ I don’t know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening.”
From the Birmingham
museum, the Staffordshire treasure, much of it still encrusted with dirt, will go to the British Museum in London, where the
artifacts will undergo months, possibly years, of study by archaeologists and historians. A court ruling this week declared
the finds to be treasure, meaning that they belong to the British crown, which is expected to offer them for sale.
The crown’s
practice, established in part by the many shipwrecks recovered off Britain’s shores, is that a reward equal to the value
of the items — likely to be set in a bidding war among British museums — will be divided between Mr. Herbert as
the finder and the farmer who owns the field where the discovery was made. His name and the location of the farm — beyond
the fact that it is around Lichfield, north of Birmingham — have not been disclosed, to allow archaeologists to continue
searching the area for more treasure.
At the news conference, experts said that Mr. Herbert’s initial discovery, which he
reported to a Staffordshire County official responsible for archaeological discoveries, was followed by a dig that was strictly
supervised by professional archaeologists. They were assisted, the experts said, by a team from Britain’s Home Office
that normally works on crime scene forensics.
The experts said that a painstaking search of the area had turned up no trace of a grave, a building
or anything else that suggested a careful plan to bury the objects for later recovery. They said that information, and the
fact that none of the discoveries appeared to be jewelry or other feminine items, added to the likelihood that the treasure
was war bounty. It may have been seized by one of the seventh-century Mercian kings — men like Penda, Wulfhere and Aethelred
— who pursued an aggressive, plundering policy toward neighboring kingdoms.
One of the features
that led specialists to suggest the items might have been seized in battle and prized for their value in precious metal and
jewels rather than as trophies was that many appeared to have been decorative pieces ripped from other objects. The three
Christian crosses in the find had been bent into folds, as had a strip of gold with a biblical inscription in Latin of a kind
likely to have been favored by an ancient warrior: “Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who
hate thee be driven from thy face.”
Archaeologists, anthropologists and historians who participated in the Staffordshire dig,
or who have studied the finds at the Birmingham museum, competed in the superlatives they used in describing the treasure.
“My first view of the hoard brought tears to my eyes; the Dark Ages in Staffordshire have never looked so bright nor
so beautiful,” Deb Klemperer, an expert on Staffordshire artifacts of the Anglo-Saxon period, told the British newspaper
The Guardian.
Kevin Leahy, an expert on Anglo-Saxon metallic objects who has been helping catalog the items, described their
craftsmanship as “consummate” at Thursday’s news conference. He added: “All the archaeologists who
have worked with the finds have been awestruck. It’s actually been quite scary working on this material to be in the
presence of greatness.”
|