American history is great, but.....

[Ted750]

Hello everyone, I'm Ted..... I'm new to this particular forum but I've been lurking about some of the other MDing forums online for quite a bit. I'm 16, and I've been detecting for 6/7 years, I'm an aspiring Egyptologist, and that's about all you need to know about me.

So now that the introduction is out of the way, who's up for a nice discussion?

I love American History, and the many quirks and battles and cultures and generally the unique way it all meshed together to form our current society, but I occasionally get discouraged by the complete lack of sheer age to our society. For example..... After three years of detecting, I found my oldest U.S. coin so far, an 1854 w/arrows quarter..... Here, three years later, I'm still working on beating that.

The reason it's a tad bit discouraging is I went to London on vacation last August and had the privilege of meeting up with the local treasure hunters, "The Mudlarks" who troll about the foreshore of the river Thames at low tide picking up the wastes and treasures of the city's 2200+ year history. I figured it would be hard going to find anything, and I was told to try it out with no detector, just eyeballing it, because there's a specific technique on how to operate a detector in the Thames that's hard to learn..... I figured I'd be out of luck, but after only about an hour and a half I came up with a 1600's jetton, SEVERAL Georgian coppers, two Georgian silvers, a selection of later coins, two medieval lead tokens, two Roman Bronzes, and many kinds of tools spanning from the dark ages onward.

Now seriously.....

America is great in it's own right, and has a very awesome history, but I sometimes wish it was a bit..... Longer, ya' know? Anyone agree with me? I think you European metal detectorists have it easy.....

OH, and I went back the day after I met up with the mudlarks to a spot along the river they recommended for old clay pipes and came up with this monstrous tooth! It's really quite scary..... It's about 2 inches long! The British Museum brushed it off and told me it was an animal tooth, but the American Dental Association seems to disagree. They tell me proportionately the human should have been 9 feet tall? Ha, pretty amazing..... They could have it if they wanted, if they found out it was significant at all..... Oh, and speaking of that, all the permits were in order when I was hunting about, and to be REALLY sure I double checked with the British Museum before taking my treasure home, so don't worry.....

Anyway, yeah..... Does anyone agree with me? I feel like metal detecting might be easier in New York if the treasure had a bit longer to accumulate, lol.