Saturday
Yesterdays blog was to be the last one for the week but things change. At the press conference we presented the Vinkovci archaeological department with their own CTX 3030 to show our appreciation for the help and hospitality they have afforded us, not just during our stay but also beforehand in ensuring that all the relevant permissions and paperwork were in place.
The CTX 3030 is very different from the machine they had at their disposal so a training session was in order. My companion for the trip was Gordon Heritage, a Minelab Professional so who better to give Steve Gaunt a crash course masterclass in how to use the machine. Steve took us to a field that had been detected before and yielded a few medieval bits and pieces. A couple of Steve’s friends came with us as well which gave the morning the right recipe for a nice, relaxed detecting session. Just what we needed before our 24 hour drive back to England.
Out in the field myself and our two new companions it was headphones on and eyes down for our last session whilst Gordon gave Steve a guided tour of the CTX 3030 and its features, especially the Geohunt and Findpoint capabilities that had proved to be so essential to our trip. It wasn’t long before I was into my first signal which to my delight was a small double banded ring, so small that it wouldn’t fit over the tip of my little finger. My next signal wasn’t quite so welcome, a small ointment tube, the first I had found in Croatia but a very common annoyance back home in the U.K.
I noticed that our companions were concentrating on an area right in the middle of the field so I turned and started working my way over to them, detecting as I went. Another signal, another ring. Again, it was a medieval one but this time slightly bent but still dated to around the 15th century. Another look up at where our companions were and I noticed that Steve and Gordon had joined in the hunt. So I quickened my pace a little, I was sure I was missing out on something good, but what?
When I got close to where the others were I didn’t need to ask what was happening. On the way over to them I had two signals, both of which were silver hammered coins of Sigismund and Maria from the 15th century medieval period. There had also been a large Celtic Bronze coin found, it was of the same type we had recovered the previous day and another Apollonian coin. We didn’t have too long on this site, we needed to eat lunch and say our goodbyes before setting off on our journey home but what a wonderful end to a fantastic week, another hoard! In all we recovered 31 coins from this hoard with more, deeper signals that we left in the ground. The archaeologists will recover those at a later date.
During our stay we had recovered two medieval hoards, one Celtic hoard and found countless coins and artefacts from over two millennia from 100 B.C. to the Homeland war of the early 1990’s. In fact, if you wish to include the flint scraper and Neolithic hand axe which were eyes-only finds we had made finds spanning 6,000 years of human life. We had been instrumental in dating two new sites which have now been protected by law. Due to our efforts, the Croatian Ministry of culture are to recommend that every archaeological unit in Croatia should be using metal detectors to both identify sites and assist in the location and recovery of metal objects on archaeological digs, that’s something that our friend and host Hrvoje Vulac has been pushing for for 10 years. On top of all of this we had made new friends. What more could you want from the best hobby in the world?
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