What Artifacts/Treasures Have You Found Excavating

[Allan M]

I have now cut close to 1 mile of hiking trails on my 18 acres of virgin land in Northern California. I'm getting better at it with help from my colleagues on this site giving me feedback on cutting techniques, etc... I'm cutting through heavy scrub brush, manzanita and oak. This is land that is difficult to walk through without a machete or chain saw--and some areas almost too steep to climb on foot. In all this cutting I have not found a single artifact: no skeletons, no Indian arrowheads (Ohlone tribes used to be in this area), no cowboy's hidden gold. Nothing. I'm wondering what artifacts or treasures others might have found during their excavation work. Thanks a bunch.

 

[skyking1]

Nothing out in the brush like that. In the cities i have found old glass, things like that. I have a real snake oil bottle somewhere that I found on the river levee.

 

[DMiller]

We live where the plains Indians once roamed, sadly the early settlers dismantled most of the highly visible burial sites or later residents raided many of the ceremonial sites then destroyed much of the remaining evidence much of it inadvertently by farming the ground.
Our place was also terraced in the 1940s so any trace of previous lives was permanently eliminated.
Still can walk creek lines as a neighbor does and find a odd arrow or spear head where are sites along the river edges that settlement sites have been detected. Find carbon deposits from fires and broken pottery shards but much is trivial.

 

[grandpa]

I was hired once by the University of Minnesota to dig in a peat bog in one of our state parks. I would take a scoup, place it carefully in a screening cradle and sit and wait until they screened that bucketful out. They were working adjacent to an ancient Indian burial ground. They found several Bison bones that were carbon dated back from 150,000 years ago.
I also dug for the local sheriffs department for human remains. A guy that I actually knew who turned up missing. Fortunately we didn't find anything, but they never did find the guy..... ever.

 

[KSSS]

I keep thinking that I will find something really interesting but I never have. Other than some interesting bottles and a rock that the indian's must have strapped to a handle to use as a hammer based on the way it has been notched out for a rope, which is on my desk. One of my guys lost his phone in the dirt one day, and surprisingly fit popped out of the ground while I was backdragging and it still worked.

 

[Allan M]

You guys are bumming me out! I was thinking that some of you have found really cool stuff. In California, 2013, a couple walking on their property up in Gold Country found a rusty can. It was full of gold coins. Here's the link to the story if you're interested. I guess it's like playing the lottery. However, someone out there running an excavator must of scored big.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_Ridge_Hoard

 

[Tones]

In the 70's I did alot of demolition work and was always finding stuff under concrete slabs. Back in the day there wasn't any rubbish collection so people would dig a hole and chuck the rubbish into it until it was full then dig another one. So at the end of my working day I'd put the gummy (toothless) bucket on the digger and go looking for the old pits. The bottle collectors hated me. An earthenware jar it still have has been priced at over $5000. Most of what I had I gave away when I shifted to Australia.

 

[skyking1]

I was on a dig where we had archaeologists in the whole nine yard I'll post about it later.

 

[skyking1]

Here is an article about the cleanup plan, not dated but I was out there in 2003 I think.
https://southsoundbiz.com/examiner_posts/weyerhaeuser-contends-the-soil-is-not-as-clean-as-it-looks/

Dupont made dynomite and ammo components there and it was a company town. Weyerhaeuser purchased the property for real estate development, not knowing just how messed up it was. They went to court and split the costs of cleanup.
They dug deep chasing the nitroglycerin that had leaked into the soil in a few places. We also stripped the top foot off of 565 acres, that is a 3/4 million cubic yards of soil contaminated with lead and arsenic. The lead was from the fires outlined below.
The dynomite was stored in lead lined wood warehouses, and years ago somebody had the brilliant idea of hauling it all to a burn site so they would not have to deal with the contaminated wood. This fire sent up a plume of smoke laden with lead, which quickly settled out onto that land. OOOPS!
The arsenic was a byproduct of the nearby Asarco smelting plant, and was used as an herbicide. They had a narrow gauge railroad on site and were also very cautious about keeping the weeds down, so they did not spark a fire from the tracks and blow the whole place up.
They had a golf course designed to cap all the strippings. They had GPS and a D8 to do the final grading of each layer as shown on this golf course.
The dozer operator stripped the top off of a couple of different caskets from the original methodist mission and also gravesites from Fort Nisqually, which was in the middle of the site more or less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Nisqually
The Nisqually tribe had members out there, and also hired archaeologists that would observe and stop us when we found artifacts. I never did dig up any interesting stuff, but there were a couple of gravesites that were relocated and we had a few shutdowns with a ceremony for re-interring what they figured were native american remains.
The old DuPont stuff was plenty interesting for me. I ran a Marooka down the railroad grade to the location of the dock. The grade was all contaminated and an operator would strip off a foot and then they would re-test, using a 200 with a tilt bucket.
After it was cleaned up they made a nice trail down the railroad grade, which was down the canyon of Sequalitchew Creek.
https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/dupont-sequalitchew-creek

 

[skyking1]

Here is the golf course info, with the typical section of 12" of pit run, 6" of topsoil, sand, and the golf course turf.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ecologywa/sets/72157638050616645/
They hauled in topsoil from all over for a few years prior and made a 186,000 yard mountain of it. The only issue with that was the layer of dirty dirt under it! I loaded it out with a 450 Hitachi with a 6' cleanup bucket and 5~7 offroad trucks. That is a big extra, moving 186,000 yards.
sometimes they had a decent run, but the worst day I loaded 377 30 and 40 ton truck loads. They had 6 trucks on about a 3 minute round. There was always 3 trucks sitting there and it was just angry loading. Dig forward and walk on a 8' high bench, turn around and eat the bench as you go, then notch into the pile eat that bench and repeat.

EDIT:
Look at the Hole 14 picture in that album and there is a picture of a fellow operator who is 6'2" that I took with him there for scale!
I had him stand by the 400 Johnny truck, I don't remember sharing the pics with the management but I must have.

 

[treemuncher]

I did a demolition job somewhere around 2000. After I took down the house and buried it with the excavator, I used the Posi-Trac with a cutterhead to clean up the surrounding area of any loose debris and vegetation. I found out months later that I took the tops off of several mason jars filled with silver dollars somewhere in that yard. The owner found them and recovered them.

Other than finding some marijuana fields on government ground and lots & lots of logger's cables everywhere I've worked, no major treasures. Odd pieces of junk like tractor transmissions, wheels, tramp iron, RR parts - all hiding in the bushes and waiting to kill my teeth - lots of that crap always costing me money.

 

[skyking1]

cool story about the coins. Yes a bad day is wrapping up a choker in your track that is still strong. I don't have cutters to destroy but have spent some time extracting a rusty old cable.

 

[John C.]

The only thing worse than wire rope wrapped up on the inside of a dozer drive sprocket is mattress and box spring steel wrapped up in any implement that turns.

 

[Allan M]

Here is the golf course info, with the typical section of 12" of pit run, 6" of topsoil, sand, and the golf course turf.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ecologywa/sets/72157638050616645/
They hauled in topsoil from all over for a few years prior and made a 186,000 yard mountain of it. The only issue with that was the layer of dirty dirt under it! I loaded it out with a 450 Hitachi with a 6' cleanup bucket and 5~7 offroad trucks. That is a big extra, moving 186,000 yards.
sometimes they had a decent run, but the worst day I loaded 377 30 and 40 ton truck loads. They had 6 trucks on about a 3 minute round. There was always 3 trucks sitting there and it was just angry loading. Dig forward and walk on a 8' high bench, turn around and eat the bench as you go, then notch into the pile eat that bench and repeat.

EDIT:
Look at the Hole 14 picture in that album and there is a picture of a fellow operator who is 6'2" that I took with him there for scale!
I had him stand by the 400 Johnny truck, I don't remember sharing the pics with the management but I must have.

This is an amazing story. Expensive clean-up job. I suspect that there are many of these sites around the USA that need this special attention. Thanks for sharing.

 

[RollOver Pete]

On a new site grabbing and getting things ready for the rest of the equipment when it shows. Since this site sets on Indian land, we have an Indian artifacts saver guy, a biologists an a geologist working with me. It's interesting what they find and flag off for further inspection. This interesting little specimen......I'm not sure what if any historical, biological or geological significance it has......but I went around it anyways . Figured I'd leave it for the grade checker to deal with

 

[skyking1]

It didn't get wrapped up in the tracks, but the most durable thing I came across was on a landfill job we were digging in gas trenches just like drainfield with perf pipe going to wash Rock to collect the gas.
I've got this 120 Hitachi and I'm bailing along pretty good, garbage can be tough. I hook in and stand that little excavator right on its toes! What the heck is this?
It was what appeared to be an entire short dump truck load of steel banding that had been dumped out and then sheepsfooted in.
It felt like I'd grabbed the whole world it took me quite a while to pick that crap apart.

 

[Willie B]

Nothing of value.
I'm also an electrician, found dead animals, rats, rats, rats, mice by the dozens. Now & again a note left by a carpenter, A penny of the date of construction.

Just once, I was a young man rewiring a house first wired in 1904. The lady owner was born there 94 years earlier. At the time of her birth her parents lived with her mother's father. Later, she had a brief stormy marriage with one child. Soon the new husband left. Ultimately, this 94 year old lady had lived in only one house.

I was in a bedroom with wide gaps between floor boards. In a gap beneath the baseboard I pulled out a piece of broken glass. Then I noticed it had an oval shape with facets. As I sat cross legged, I was close to a window. I scratched it & sure enough it was harder than glass!

I took it to the owner. She was delighted. It was a stone from a ?lavolier? her grandfather had given her when she graduated nursing school at age of 18. The stone had been lost something like 75 years.

 

[Willie B]

I live in Otter Valley VT. As a kid I had friends obsessed with Aqua Lung equipment. Two brothers were always searching Otter Creek bottom for Indian artifacts. They brought up hundreds of axe, spear & arrow heads.

At the time the surrounding flat lands were spotted with 10' holes with piles of dirt beside. I presumed they were caused when huge pine trees uprooted & over decades, the stumps rotted away. My guess was wrong. I later learned an archeologist was digging for Indian artifacts. If he wasn't successful, he made up for it with persistence.

 

[treemuncher]

Yes a bad day is wrapping up a choker in your track that is still strong. I don't have cutters to destroy but have spent some time extracting a rusty old cable.

The only thing worse than wire rope wrapped up on the inside of a dozer drive sprocket is mattress and box spring steel wrapped up in any implement that turns.

I was referring to loggers' cables that get caught up in my cutter heads, not the tracks. I never seem to have any issues with stuff in the tracks other than saplings. Sometimes it's chain, silt fence, carpet, fencing, cables, ropes, dead cows or a number of other things that can bind up a cutter head and stop it dead in its tracks. Carpet is the absolute WORST. Metal fencing, cable, strapping = cutting torch or plasma cutter or air arc or welding rod and is pretty easy to get out. Now how in the world do you cut out a mass of carpet jammed in so tight you can't spin the head? A cherry red hot lance, with a duct tape handle, made from 3/4" wide by 1/8" steel stock heated with a torch is the ONLY way I've found to get into those tight spaces and cut that crap out. You can't make a cut in those tight spaces with a regular knife!

Lots of time a light piece of cable or other stringy material can be allowed to "spin out" until it self destructs into little flying pieces. You don't want to be near the machine when that is happening, especially if it's fencing or cable.

The dead cow never did stop the cutter completely but every time I ate red meat for the next 6 months, all I could do was smell that dead cow. Barf!

 

[mowingman]

When I was managing a sand and gravel plant, the dragline dug up a Mammoth tusk. We donated it to one of the local universities. We were shut down for about a week while their students looked for other artifacts. Nothing else was found.