Dug up anything interesting?

[digger242j]

I was digging a foundation today in what had at first appeared to be virgin dirt. It turned out that there was some fill there, and I dug up a few chuncks of brick and pipe, but it got me to thinking about some of the other interesting stuff I've come across over the years.

One example is a sewer trench I was digging on a site that had formerly been a residential neighborhood. The houses had been built in the late 19th or early 20th century and razed in the mid 1960s. I dug through the old dry-laid stone foundation wall, and was peeling up the thin cement floor of what had once been a house. The soil underneath was pretty sandy, and obviously the floor had simply been poured on top of the dirt. I noticed a big chunk of something in one bucketful so I dropped it on the ground away from the spoil pile. Later on I took a look to see what it might be, and it turned out to be two pipe wrenches, about 24 inch ones. They were rusted not quite to the point of being unrecognizable. They'd been laying side by side, about 3" apart under that floor since the original house had been built. I wonder if that plumber ever figured out where he'd lost them? :confused:

Anybody else ever find anything interesting?

[paulsoccodato]

lets see,

a bunch of old bottles, a few strange looking rocks, a large piece of coral, a hard black triangle shaped rock thing (still have no idea what it is, but it looks good on the shelf),

and the poor racoon i split in half with my bradco 609.

[Steve Frazier]

My favorite dig was at a large farm house built in the mid 1800s. In those days, most refuse was carried to the door and dropped. I dug up a lot of broken porcelin china, clay jugs, assorted bones(nothing human looking!), and clam shells from clam bakes of years gone by. I even found a unique looking marble.

When I was digging here for my home, I unearthed what looks like an old stone foundation. Rumor has it my property was a stage coach stop from NYC to Albany where the horses were also switched. This may have been the horses barn.

About 150' away on the next lot, there was a small stone foundation with a brick chimney at one end, this may have been the stage stop with a stove for heat. I found an old barn spike in the area too.

I also dug up a plow share here, this was part of an old farm. I really am intrigued by some of the thins you can find.

[BKrois]

Over the summer, my boss and I spent a large chunk of time doing site work at a vacant lot in down town New Haven, CT. When we started digging for the drywells at first, we noticed a lot of building debris where we were digging. The company who demo'd the old house basically just dug a hole and buried everything it it. We even pulled out some old walls still underground. There was soo much brick and garbage it wasn't funny. Of course, i was the one picking out the garbage:rolleyes: Even an old gas line was still below, luckily it wasn't hooked up anymore!

When i was digging around a stump in my house i found an old spark plug, some oil nails and other things. Where our house is, years ago was an apple orchard and our neighbors house was the main house for the orchard.


It's always interesting to see what lies below the surface.

[digger242j]

I'm sure those of us who've spent most of our time in urban settings have dug up a lot more items than those who've done most of their work in what's always been counytryside.

The place I dug up the pipewrenches was a 70 townhouse and 3 condominium building site in Pittsburgh's east end. It bordered a main street that had been a road since the pioneer days.

In an area that had once (like for the better part of the 20th century), been a large commercial bakery building, I dug into a wooden structure in the ground. It was about 4 feet square and the dirt inside was...well, it was definitely different than what was outside of it. What it was, if you haven't guessed yet, was the remains of an outhouse, which had obviously stood on the site before the bakery.

[paulsoccodato]

i dug up an old 7up bottle from the 50's, at work today.

another piece for the shelf

[cat320]

I have a bunch of old coke,milk,beer and other assorted bottles from the past.

[digger242j]

By the time we had finished at the site I was talking about above, I had a four drawer filing cabinet full of old bottles. I left them behind when I broke up with my ex, and I'll bet she trashed them all....

I found a good spot there one day and called a guy I knew who's a bottle collector. We spent Saturday afternoon digging by hand and found a few interesting pieces. One fragment we found was just one side of an old bottle. He told me that if that one had been whole it would have been worth a couple hundred bucks!

[DKinWA]

I've only had my excavation business for a little over a year, so I haven't had the opportunity to dig up much. Usually what I dig up are old bottles and jars and other unidentifiable metal stuff. On one project, I found a bunch of broken glass/dishes and dug around in it with a shovel for at least half an hour. I finally gave up when I figured out that the folks that dumped the stuff there did it for a good reason:D

[motrack]

about 2 years ago they started a large dirt job here in Columbus Indiana and found a indian burial site. That shut the whole job down for a year..........

[digger242j]

About ten years ago I was working for another excavating contractor and he told us that the general contractor had been told there was a possibility of the same sort of thing--Indian burial grounds. His orders were very specific: "If you see anything that even resembles an Indian artifact, cover it up and keep on going. We don't have time for that sort of (expletive deleted)!"

[digger242j]

I thought I'd bump this thread back to the top again, since it sort of came up in the "hysterical artifacts" thread anyway.

I didn't realize I'd posted that bit about the Indian artifacts until I just re-read this thread.

Tuney443, what's the story behind the reference to the mastadon skull in your sig?

[rino1494]

I dug up a old concrete sewer main pipe that was no longer in use.

I dug a foundation for a townhouse that was on a site where a old school house was that burned down back in the 70's. Man, there were some neat stuff in that hole. I even found a old motorcycle. I was digging down for a frost footer for the walkout and I found the old basement floor. Low and behold, the damn floor was right on money for grade. The old floor even had expansion joints in them.

[gordyo]

One large bone belonging to the leg of a Horse

[bobcatuser]

I was digging for an addition and found a gold ring buried in the garden. On another job we demolished a building built in 1903 and found a set of roller skates made of cast iron and leather under the slab.

[Dozerboy]

Out here we constantly dig up fossilized sea shells in the deep cuts along coastal areas. IIRC there 4 mili. years old or so. That is the only really unique thing I have found IIRC.

[xkvator]

i was loosening up a pile of topsoil in the spring, and what i thought was a tennis ball rolled down the yard.
figured it belonged to the homeowners Lab, so i went & picked it up...it was a hibernating toad that was full of p!ss...perfectly round.
I quickly moved my hand...held it under the front legs & it let loose...

[knucklehead98]

I didn't actually dig it up ,my boss did. He was ditching with a excavator in East St. Louis and he dug up a missing prostitute:eek:

[bobcat ron]

Back in '99 I dug up an old butter dish from the Canadian National Railroad when they were still running passenger service through the Matsqui station, turns out the low spot I was digging in was used as a landfill for the CNR's garbage, the plate dates back to the 1940's and the writing and CNR emblem was still intact.

[jkiser96]

The lot that my barn is on, I was letting my son try out the mini when he hit something so I get in & pull up a complete 426 hemi along with a lot of other mopar parts. The previous owner worked for Chrysler in Indy and his son was a motorhead. While digging for the wifes new pool 2 weeks ago I found about 1000 of the old insulators that were on the electric poles from the old inter urban that run through our little town :beatsme

[landrvrnut22]

I built a strip mall on an old farm. We hit all kinds of garbage all over, however, the weirdest was a big roll of steel cable. The cable was about 2" in diameter. Dug a monster hole to get it out, the Komatsu 270 was barley able to pick it up, and barely fit into the bed of a Terex 35 artic.

I have a picture somewhere.

[bobcat ron]

I built a strip mall on an old farm. We hit all kinds of garbage all over, however, the weirdest was a big roll of steel cable. The cable was about 2" in diameter. Dug a monster hole to get it out, the Komatsu 270 was barley able to pick it up, and barely fit into the bed of a Terex 35 artic.

I have a picture somewhere.


Did you take it to a scarp yard?

[bear]

jkiser there are a lot of people that collect those insulators. try putting them on eby or maybe talk to some linemen. I have about 50 different ones including some made of wood.

[Dirtman2007]

I've dug up several guns. Mostly find tires and trash.

http://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/Forum/showthread.php?t=4248

[Burnout]

This winter I dug up a little plastic woman, like a 6" doll. She was hot only had on plastic underwear, so I taped her to the dash of my buddies loader since he has been feeling lonely.

But when I was 13 my first job away from home with the old man I was running our 310. I dug up a plastic ninja turtle. I glued him to the hood of the backhoe and to this day he is still there.

[Big Iron]

Dug up a wooden beer keg (about 7.5 gals of beer)full with the cork still in it,made by the Sunshine Brewing company, Kellogg Idaho dated 1903 on a mine reclamation job. Gave it to a museum (The Sprag Pole tavern/restaurant/museum) in Murray, (population about 10 maybe 11:beatsme) Idaho. Also dug up some never used ore carts from the same mine and gave them to the same museum. If you are ever in Murray it is well worth the time to visit The Sprage Pole:drinkup

[modelmaker]

Let me see, in 30+ odd years of operating, 1 saxon village, 1 spitfire, 1 roman wall, hundreds of victorian jars an bottles, 1 iron age settlement, 14 ww2 mortar shells, and countless fossils, everytime you put bucket into the ground on a new job here in the county of Kent there has to be an archeological dig first, on small jobs that entails stripping the topsoil off while under the watchfull eye of young tree huggers armed with bricklayers trowels and brushes, great job, on larger jobs they do assesment strips, and if anything of historical value is found then the whole area is then stripped, could delay a job for 6 months, but worth it just the same. History has been rewritten many times over finds doing it this way.

:drinkup Martyn

[landrvrnut22]

Did you take it to a scarp yard?

Yes we did, it paid for a big party at the end of the job for all the subs.

[Serv]

The guy that sold me my yard dug up a tusk of a wooly mammoth while mining sand and gravel. It is on display at our local library.

[stretch]

My friends and I were digging in a rather large depression for a paintball fort last year and we started digging up bricks, hardware, tools, china, anthracite coal, glass, pretty much any old farm junk. I realized it was an old shed foundation and told them we should dig around another nearby depression which I figured was the actual barn. (We haven't done that yet.)We also dug up a car door a few weeks back but we haven't figured out what it's from.

[jkiser96]

jkiser there are a lot of people that collect those insulators. try putting them on eby or maybe talk to some linemen. I have about 50 different ones including some made of wood.

I will dig through them & find the good ones. I just got in from repairing a field tile & we first dug up a car gas tank, then the muffler & converter, then some fence & a farm gate , & then we pulled out a v-6 chevy complete with air breather and all. so I called my buddies with a junk yard & we loaded there little Ranger full.:beatsme

[tuney443]

The skull to the mastodon in Hyde Park,NY---youngest mastodon ever found on the planet---app.12K years young.And hundreds of bottles,antiques,etc.--a friend who's the president of his bottle club{doesn't that sound exciting?}wants me to call him everytime I come across another mother lode of them.I tell him just SURE.:D

[camara]

A couple of years ago I was doing my first directional drilling job in Plymouth, MA. 200 feet for a water service near the beach in the sand. Couple of hours I thought. Be home by noon! Yeah right! As I started I bounced off something....a little while later the drill got bound up and wouldn't spin. Dug up that spot and got a roll of chain link fence. Then a nother couple hours and I hit something solid. Pulled the drill back some & started digging. We pulled out a cast iron bath tub, then some pieces of furniture, a refridgerator and more household stuff. After wrecking the guys yard an old timer came by and asked what we were doing. Make a long story short about 50 years ago there was a cottage / 3 season house on site that burned. They buried it, filled in the land and graded over it. And to top it off I didn't get paid!:mad:

[buddy605]

back during the war there was a large explosion that almost wiped out the downtown core, and they just bulldozed everything down after to clean it up so I have been around when we found glasses and plates, milk bottles, medicine bottles, silverware, old chainsaw, bikes, ww1 rifles 303 british, old gas lines from when they had gas lanturns on, and when lots of part when we made a parking lot at titanic burial ground. Whenever we do some excavating dowtown we tell the operator to put the feather cutting edge on.

[bobcat ron]

back during the war there was a large explosion that almost wiped out the downtown core, and they just bulldozed everything down after to clean it up so I have been around when we found glasses and plates, milk bottles, medicine bottles, silverware, old chainsaw, bikes, ww1 rifles 303 british, old gas lines from when they had gas lanturns on, and when lots of part when we made a parking lot at titanic burial ground. Whenever we do some excavating dowtown we tell the operator to put the feather cutting edge on.


That was the really big ammo ship explosion from WW1 right?

[buddy605]

a ammunitions ship collided with anouther ship. Largest explosion until the atomic bomb. There is a bent up part of a cannon that is on display where it landed, it must of fly 2 or more miles inland.:eek:

Also on anouther project dug up a whale spine and I was inland about 10 miles that was really cool. Had the university come out and excavate that one for us.

[02Dmax]

we did the dirtwork for a new townhome subdivision here in town and we discovered that there had been an old factory that burned down and they buried it and apparently left the hole open as a landfill for awhile too. We dug up 2 30,000 gal. tanks that were used to hold that old crude oil looking heating oil. they were still half full. our dozers still have that tar in some spots on them 2 years later.

[Wolf]

My friends found an old ship from the gold rush. The area had been filled in after the ship was abandoned, and they hit it with the hoe. Needless to say it stopped work for a few days. Ship is going into the maritime museum, but they gave me a few pieces of it.

[stretch]

My friends found an old ship from the gold rush. The area had been filled in after the ship was abandoned, and they hit it with the hoe. Needless to say it stopped work for a few days. Ship is going into the maritime museum, but they gave me a few pieces of it.

That must be San Francisco...it was on the History Channel. Apparently it's nothing new over there, just towed them in and filled them over.

[CAT D9H]

Well I have dug up all sorts of interesting things here in the southwest old pottery, arrowheads, you know stuff like that , but the craziest/ scariest was human bones , we were diggin a foundation for a house in the mountains it was very virgin land we had to cut trees over 150 years old to get there , but we were close to an indian reservation and I was digging , everything was going smooth till I saw something that was out of place in my bucket , asked the ground man what it was , he picked it up and said "a jaw bone " well I told him to set it aside and kept on digging well we found more and more so I shut down and called my sheriff friend up there, big mistake by the way , pretty soon the whole police force , mobil crime lab , the whole 9 was there and they shut us down to proseed with the investigation they came over to us and said those bones were about 100+ years old and we better hope we didnt stumble onto an old indian burial ground , luckly we didnt dig anything else up