What have you found in the ground?

Good Morning!

It seems something that you inevitably do as a Permie is dig into the dirt. We focus on organic matter, mineral soils, and bugs but in the soil there tends to lay other things... like artifacts!

What have you found in the ground while you have been digging?

My property used to house a stable so it isn't unusual to find old horseshoes here and there. I have them nailed up on my mudroom outer wall as a kind of fun reminder.

square nails and a couple horseshoes.. using a metal detector

I also found a spoon while grinding a stump with a stump grinder

When we went up to the forest after the fire to plant chestnuts and walnuts, we noticed a round pottery thing in the ground.  I suspected it might be an old lost pine resin collecting thing. I tried to dig it out with my fingers, and then with a bit of rock, and then with the point of the planting stick. But to no avail.



The next time we went up there I remembered to take my hori hori with me.

Short youtube videos don't seem to embed any more, but here's the link if you want to see us actually attempting to excavate. Excuse the heavy breathing - that hill is steep and I'm seriously out of condition!

https://youtube.com/shorts/YudNei5f1Ko?si=nNdD9-rOIQoFFKqE

After a few minutes he turned up with a rather old but intact resin collecting pot!

There was one in the house when we bought it and I was devastated when we managed to break it. Finding an intact one buried on the land is just perfect.



My little dragons were fascinated by it but I wouldn't let them clean it up too much as I wanted it to be 'authentic.' So we brushed it but didn't wash it, to preserve the history.



Then we filled it up with some of the tree seeds that we hadn't planted yet. I think it looks just perfect, and a wonderful link to the past as that pot was most certainly used by the previous owner of the property to supply resin to this house. Which is a lovely and very direct link to the history of the place.



Here's a youtube video that has some nice clips of the traditional way of harvesting the pine resin.

Well... not really a thing but more of a condition. There seems to just be a hole in the ground that has been discovered between my house and the neighbors. It is at least a rake handle deep and seems to have water in the base?

Ohh boy. Here we go.

When I was a kid, my siblings and I found a huge number of buttons in a pile. Someone's collection got spilled perhaps. Two quart jars full of random old buttons.

At our place out in West Texas, we dug up an old Army spoon.

I can only assume it was from back when the Buffalo Soldiers might have been in the area or when a famous Mexican bandit was captured.

When I was a teen, we were excavating, by hand, to build a bermed, primarily round wood barn. One of my brothers' shovel hit hollow metal... We all started helping him, because, at first, he couldn't find the edge. When we finally got it up, it was a heavy copper pot, designed for cooking fish, but on opening it, we discovered the remains of a human baby. We contacted the family we bought the place from & they looked into their family history, and discovered that it was a stillborn boy, born approximately(because I can't recall the actual date, anymore) 135 years earlier. So, they were very grateful, and took the remains, and buried them in their family plot, on their own land.

I did some digging to pop some comfrey plants out on the back end of my property where an old structure once stood and found a couple things...