What have you found while digging?

We all have a story to tell.Besides the usual old bottles That I have found. I did find an old Indian bracelet that hasn't been able to be tracked to a particular tribe. The most unusual find for me was about 20 years ago I was working for a very old and well known mission in San Diego. I was excavating an area way out on the outskirts of their property to create a parking lot for their new Parrish hall that I would start the footing on . The hall was to be with 20 columns and the footings would be 5ftx5ft square. On my first footing about 2ft down I start pulling up pottery. Now the whole time I'm digging I have at least 2 guys from the church checking the material coming out. Another foot down and I start pulling out what I told them looked like a leg bone. They tell me to keep digging their record show this area was an dump and that it was probably a mule bone. Still a little concerned but the church guys tell me to keep digging so my next bucket full comes up and as I clear the material out of it a human skull appears. STOP STOP STOP is the word and the archaeologist are brought in. In my digging I find an Indian burial spot that dated back to the 1700. By the way, out of the 20 columns,19 had human remains. I never did get to complete that job. It is now part of the history there at the mission.

Your post would be 100x easier to read if you hit the ENTER button a few times.

Jus sayin...

I read it just fine. Are you a School Teacher?

Reel, thanks for sharing I found it interesting. We have found bottles, a few arrow heads that kind of stuff. We have a fun, but no so funny story.

We where digging a set of footers for a new garage, the home owners where excited and all watching. The husband comes up to me before we start and I double checking the locates and ask if anything else might be in the area (old garden). He states that they had a dog that had died about a year ago, and had buried behind house 50 feet away from where we were digging, so we are good. I was on the excavator and the 3rd scoop out comes the family dog, with the entire family setting on the picnic table just a few feet away. The wife walks away in tears, the husband and family follows into the house and here we set with the dog in bucket but ourselves. After a while the husband emerges and asks if we could bury behind the house where they thought he was buried.

The next day I had to ask how did the dog get into the old garden area such a long distance for the tree the planet as a marker, and he said he didn't know, and he dug the hole.....

I was working on a project right next to the Snake River in Lewiston, Idaho a few years ago, digging a setteling pond. As part of the contract, the Corp of Engineers sent a couple nice ladies over from Walla Walla to look for artifacts, as the area we were working in had never been disturbed. As I would push the scrapers through the cut, the ladies would walk along either side of the cut , right behind the Cat watching the ground.

Well, I whiped my head around at the end of my push just in time to see one of them jumping up and down and pointing at the ground. The other one waved at me to stop, so I did. The next scraper operator into the cut had already got out of his machine to see what they were looking at, so I parked and got off my Cat to see what it was. Of corse the boss comes running over to see why we stopped, thinking one of the girls had gotten run over.
We all stood in amazement looking at an about 4 foot diameter black spot on the ground. Well the girls pulled rank on us, and we had to move to a different side of the cut, so they could do what they needed to do.

The next day there must have been 25 archiologists on site, with their little trowels and shovels and brooms, inside an about 100 foot square digging away.
What the black spot ended up being was an old fire pit with about 6 inches of ash and coals in it. They think we might have taken more, but had no idea where it was dumped on the fill. They also found an old elk skull with just a little nub of an antler on one side, a bear jawbone, and some arrowheads.

They spent about a week digging and looking in that area, but that was all they found. The carbon dating on the wood chunks and bones was around 1500 years old if I remember right. The amazing thing to all of us was the fact that the artifacts were found down about 15 feet in the cut. If that scraper had been a few inches deeper, or a few inches shallower, nothing would have ever been found, and we could have finished the project 6 weeks ahead of time! (At least we were allowed to finish!)

Probably the coolest thing i have found were some dinosaur bones when we were upgrading their water treatment plant. It was so painful to wach those people move dirt with their lille trowels but it was definately worth the wait, they found a almost complete skeloten of a odd dinosaur ( not sure what the name was) it took several weeks of waiting tho.

As for other stuff i found school buses, model t that someone used as a septic tank ,c can that looked like a old grow op that the new land owner new nothing about.

If your tired of looking at it just dig a hole !

When I was 7 my brother 6 at the time was helping me dig a hole in a wooded area of our southeastern Ohio farm to bury a cat. We dug up this huge old bone and just knew we found a dinosaur so we kept digging....... and finding more bones.

After a few hours we had a wheelbarrow load and took them to the house much to my mothers dismay. Turned out to be my grandfathers dumping area when he butchered. My dad had a hard time getting us to believe that.

I once found a tire and wheel in the same woods and just knew it fell off a airplane........ oh those childhood memories.

2stickbill said:

I read it just fine. Are you a School Teacher?

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No, but if I were, I'd put you in the corner for 15 minutes.

Sorry for my mini-rant. Came right after some pretty tragic news. Just venting. Carry on.

There's another thread like this Here if your interested.

Dinosaur bones? That's got to be the coolest.

I found this 40' shipping container in a paddock we were cleaning up, looked like it was used for growing weed, not any more!


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Stevenbrla said:

No, but if I were, I'd put you in the corner for 15 minutes.

Sorry for my mini-rant. Came right after some pretty tragic news. Just venting. Carry on.

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Thanks I hope your day gets better.

While doin a water main repair in the older part of the city one of the city inspectors shut us down cause he found a bone in the cast pile. So they called in all the big wigs to inspect and it turned out one of the guys had chicken for lunch and thru the bones in the trench.
Another time we were pushing fill into the bay to make more property for the port authority and any time they would get a load in from an old part of the city i would have to spread the load so the supervisor could look for any bottles or other keepers.

For the last couple years, the company I work for has been working on preparing the Elwa River for the removal of the two dams, in Port Angles, Washington.

Two years ago I was sent up there to run the silt fence crew, putting in the 500 miles of silt fence around the waste water treatment site. The tribe assigned a kid to walk along side of the trench I was digging to put the fence in, looking for goodies. (We made a 8 inch wide bucket for our 307 hoe to put all the fence in with.) About the only thing he found was a bunch of empty Rainier, Olympia, or Haams beer cans. Every once in a while he would find a fishing lure, or a discarded gill net, but other than that he came up empty handed.

irishmc82 said:

While doin a water main repair in the older part of the city one of the city inspectors shut us down cause he found a bone in the cast pile. So they called in all the big wigs to inspect and it turned out one of the guys had chicken for lunch and thru the bones in the trench.
Another time we were pushing fill into the bay to make more property for the port authority and any time they would get a load in from an old part of the city i would have to spread the load so the supervisor could look for any bottles or other keepers.

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That one was funny...Chicken bone.

While putting in augercast pile in kalamazoo we were down at 40+ feet and pulled up a large safe. Spent 3 hours getting into the safe only to find another safe. Now 2 hours later we get the second safe open and it only had an old newspaper in it, so we parked it in the port-a-john.

andoman said:

While putting in augercast pile in kalamazoo we were down at 40+ feet and pulled up a large safe. Spent 3 hours getting into the safe only to find another safe. Now 2 hours later we get the second safe open and it only had an old newspaper in it, so we parked it in the port-a-john.

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Now that is funny

Just recently I was working on putting in some storm sewer for another contractor. We knocked loose an live unexploded mortar round.

Nac said:

Just recently I was working on putting in some storm sewer for another contractor. We knocked loose an live unexploded mortar round.

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Whoa now that could have been a blast.Good thing it didn't explode.

Nac said:

Just recently I was working on putting in some storm sewer for another contractor. We knocked loose an live unexploded mortar round.

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You should just throw that in the box of your pickup and take it back to a millitarry base !

We cleaned up a old building that was pushed in filling the basement and paved over for parking lot. The old timers before we started said it was a old speak easy. We finally got to the back of the basement near the new Legion building and found a 12" steel door in the corner. We ripped the door(freaking a beast)off and found a passageway that ran out under the road that was bricked up. I'm pretty sure its running downtown but makes me wonder if it ever been filled in completely considering its under road base.