Is $10 billion buried on Robinson Crusoe Island?

Or is this just hype to encourage visits by tourists?  This from last month's Santiago Times:

Keiser, whose treasure-seeking effort on the island the past 12 years has cost him an estimated US$2 million, is reportedly in the process of shelling out another US$100,000 dollars for this latest effort, which includes highly sophisticated mining video technology.

But Keiser’s expenses will be well covered should he find the treasure: Chilean law will provide him 25 percent of any booty he discovers, and Keiser estimates the treasure’s value at US$10 billion.

According to legend, the treasure originated in the Incan Empire and was stolen during the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th and 17th centuries. When the treasure was en route to Spain around 1715, the navigator in charge of the ship landed on Robinson Crusoe Island and buried his cargo. Before he could return to unearth the booty, an English pirate named Cornelius Webb uncovered the Incan treasure and reburied it elsewhere on the island. The legendary stash is reported to contain 800 barrels of gold, including precious pieces of gold and jewelry.

More details on the story of the treasure and new developments in the quest are available at Death by 1000 Papercuts.  See also my two posts in 2009 about archaeological digs on the island, here and here.

Roman coin treasure hoard

... What he found that afternoon is now stacked in a waist-high pile of shoe box-sized cardboard boxes, in a corner of an office in the coins department of the British Museum – a Diagon Alley place of mysteries, on two floors, protected by a three-inch-thick strongroom door.

The boxes hold the contents of a giant potbellied jar which lay in the clay of that sloping Somerset field for almost 2,000 years, filled to overflowing with the largest coin hoard ever found in a single container in Britain. "You can see what a job it's going to be to clean the horrors," Sam Moorhead, a Roman coins specialist, says fondly, running through his fingers a handful of disgusting bits of metal, green with corrosion, ragged with welded-on bits of other broken coins. Studying the 52,503 of them that are legible will occupy the experts for the rest of their careers...

... an expert committee met at the British Museum, and after hours of debate and three widely varying outside opinions on the value of the hoard, finally set a price of £320,250 on the coins, to be shared between Crisp and the landowners, Geoff and Anne Sheppard...

The conventional explanation is that these hoards are either underground piggy banks, or stashed in times of danger to be recovered when normal life resumes – or never, if the feared catastrophe overwhelms the owner... But the Frome hoard doesn't match that picture at all...

Moorhead is convinced the Frome hoard represents a stupendous offering of as much cash as the community could raise. The swords and bronze shields their ancestors threw into rivers and springs were gone, and coins were the easiest way of assembling a massive quantity of metal...

The rest of the story is at The Guardian.

Photograph: British Museum/PA

Gold boat from the Broighter Hoard

The gold boat from the Broighter Hoard --

The hoard was found near Lough Foyle in a field between Ballykelly and Limavady in County Londonderry. It was discovered by Thomas Nicholl and James Morrow while working as ploughmen for Joseph L. Gibson in February 1896. They found the hoard whilst double ploughing. That means that one plough would follow the other to gain extra depth. It was estimated that the finds were buried 14 inches (36 cm) deep and were in close proximity to each other.

The find was taken to the farm where Maggie (later Mrs Nicholl) washed the items in a sink. At that time they did not realise they were made from gold.  The hoard was eventually sold to the British Museum for six hundred pounds. It consisted of a miniature ship, complete with fittings and oars; two necklets, a bowl and a torc (or hollow collar).  The find was described as a lump of mud when initially shown. Moreover the boat had been so badly damaged by the plough that it took a goldsmith to later work out its structure...

The boat was measured at 7.25 inches (18.4 cm) by 3 inches (7.6 cm) and weighed 3 ounces (85 g). It had benches, rowlocks, two rows of nine oarsmen and a paddle for steering. It also included tools for grappling, three forks, a yardarm and a spear.

What boggles my mind is the delicacy of the work and the antiquity of the piece:  The material probably dates from the first century BC.  

Via Uncertain Times.

Treasures from Afghanistan

The Guardian has a photoset of objects found at Tillya Tepe, Afghanistan.  Pictured above:

"Pair of pendants depicting the Dragon Master in gold, turquoise, garnet, lapis lazuli, carnelian, and pearl. These elaborate hair ornaments depict a man wearing the tunic and flowing pants typical of nomadic dress. He holds two dragon-like creatures by their forelegs, a mythic scene known from ancient Persian and Siberian art that suggests power and invincibility" and

"Gold, turquoise, and carnelian boot buckles depicting a chariot drawn by dragons (Tillya Tepe, Tomb IV), 1st century BC-1st century AD."

About ten more items at the link.

3-year-old boy finds £2.5m treasure

A three-year-old boy using a metal detector for the first time has unearthed a gold pendant estimated to be worth over £2.5m. James Hyatt made the discovery while out with his father and grandfather in Hockley, Essex. He had only been scanning the soil for a matter of minutes when it started beeping...

Experts believe the rare locket, or reliquary, dates back to the 1500s and was used to hold alleged parts of Christ's crown of thorns or crucifix...

An inquest has declared the reliquary treasure trove and it could be bought for millions by an interested institution, including the British Museum. Proceeds will be split with the family and the owner of the field where the pendant was found.

I am recurrently in awe of the common sense approach British law takes to treasured discoveries.  In other countries the government would claim/try to grab the item, so instead of turning it in, the finder would probably melt this down and sell the gold lump to a jeweler.


Found at Nothing to do with Arbroath.

"Clipped" Roman coins

To be familiar with "coin-clipping," it helps to be as old as me and able to remember a time when coins were made of precious metals like gold and silver.  In that setting it was possible to shave a little metal from the rim of the coin to refashion into another coin (or to sell as bullion).  It was the practice of coin-clipping that led coin manufacturers to introduce "milled" edges, so that clipping could be detected without weighing the coins.

I was reading today about the "Hoxne hoard," which included almost 15 THOUSAND Roman gold, silver, and bronze coins.  Apparently clipping was rampant in that era; almost every silver siliqua in the hoard has been clipped.  I found it interesting that a second reason was given for coin clipping: "a deliberate attempt to maintain a stable ratio between gold and silver coins."

This vase just sold for $85,000,000

A vase found in a house clearance in London has been sold for £43m, thought to be a record for any Chinese artwork... The 18th Century Qianlong porcelain piece, found in Pinner, had been estimated to fetch up to £1.2m for the brother and sister who inherited it.

Ivan Macquisten, editor of Antiques Trade Gazette, said the vase would have been made for the Qianlong emperor. The 16in high vase is yellow and sky blue in colour with a fish motif on the front and a perforated outer wall...

The ceramic vase was made during the reign of the fourth emperor in the Qing dynasty who ruled the empire from 1735 to 1796.

It is thought the vase left China in about 1860 and was acquired by an English family during the 1930s but how it made its way to the bungalow in Pinner is a mystery, the auctioneer said.

I find it interesting that it is not that old (by Chinese standards). Presumably the provenance of belonging to an emporer contributed to the buying frenzy.

Photo - Bloomberg

Impressive gold "nugget"

"German prospector Bernhard Otto Holtermann with a mass of nearly all solid gold, Hill End, New South Wales, 1872.  The gold weighed 630lb & valued at 12,000 pounds."

Would be worth a lot more today.

Found at The Fighting Temeraire, or Everything 19th Century.

British treasure-hunter finds Roman helmet and mask

It's hard to type when I'm drooling with jealousy...

A Roman bronze helmet complete with face-mask - thought to be one of only three of its kind to be found in Britain - has been discovered by a metal detector enthusiast in Cumbria...

The helmet, with its enigmatic and virtually intact features, would have been worn, possibly with colourful streamers attached to the object, as a mark of excellence by Roman soldiers at cavalry sport parades.

Described as a ''hugely important discovery'', it is now expected to fetch £300,000 at Christie's Antiquities auction in London...

Finding neat stuff in the back yard

David Murray, 39, was digging behind his bungalow when he unearthed a dog tag from a German prisoner.  He got permission from his landlord to continue excavations and within an hour he had located old bottles, buttons from uniforms and used ammunition...

David has now recovered more than 2,000 items from the camp, including a live GRENADE that had to be blown up by a RAF bomb disposal unit...

”It’s really incredible to think that 70 years ago 10,000 prisoners of war were walking around in my back garden.”

The Wynches Camp opened in 1939 and first housed Italian prisoners, but later took Germans – some of whom did not leave until 1947.  The 40-acre camp, which held up to 10,000 prisoners, was situated in Much Hadham, and David’s landlord owns 20 acres of the land it stood on...

Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

Two gold coins

At the top a 2,200-year-old gold coin found in Israel, weighing about 1 ounce.  Below that a 2,300-year-old gold coin found in Bulgaria, with a depiction of the profile of Alexander the Great.

Found at FOX News.  Credits: AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill (top) and AP (bottom).

This silver dollar just sold for $1.2 million

The story goes that on Oct. 15, 1794, chief coiner Henry Voigt coined the silver dollars and delivered all the acceptable ones, 1,758 of them, to David Rittenhouse, director of the US Mint, according to the Smithsonian Museum of American History. He handed them out as gifts to dignitaries...

Only 140 of the 1794 so-called Flowing Hair silver dollars are thought to exist. (The coins depict a woman with long flowing hair)... The $1 coin that sold in Boston to an anonymous bidder was considered the fourth best specimen of the six mint 1794 silver dollars known to exist. The best specimen, called the Neil/Carter/Contursi 1794 Flowing Hair silver dollar, sold for nearly $7.9 million in May, setting a new record price for a coin.

Treasure hunter finds 52,000 Roman coins in the UK

The hoard, which was valued at 3.3 million pounds ($5 million), includes hundreds of coins bearing the image of Marcus Aurelius Carausius, who seized power in Britain and northern France in the late third century and proclaimed himself emperor.

Dave Crisp, a treasure hunter using a metal detector, located the coins in April in a field in southwestern England, according to the Somerset County Council and the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

The coins were buried in a large jar about a foot (30 centimeters) deep and weighed about 160 kilograms (350 pounds) in all...

"I put my hand in, pulled out a bit of clay and there was a little radial, a little bronze Roman coin — very, very small, about the size of my fingernail," Crisp said in an interview with the BBC.

He recovered about 20 coins before discovering that they were in a pot, and realized he needed expert help.

"Because Mr. Crisp resisted the temptation to dig up the coins it has allowed archaeologists from Somerset County Council to carefully excavate the pot and its contents, ensuring important evidence about the circumstances of its burial was preserved," said Anna Booth, of Somerset Council.

More details at Arab News.  CNN has a photo of the pot of coins. 

I've repeat here my previous comment that the UK leads the world in the handling of discovered treasure:

The Brits are to be endlessly commended for their thoroughly enlightened policy regarding the discovery of buried treasure. The law of the land gives half the value of the find to the person who discovers it. In many (?most) countries the government tries to confiscate anything found or repatriate it to presumed descendents, with the result that magnificent finds like the above from the whole of the world's history are routinely sold on the black market to wealthy people who hide it, or worse yet, melted down for base metal value by "potholers" ravaging archaeologic sites. Kudoes to the Brits for rewarding the finders and preserving their heritage.

For a sad comparison, see the post below this on the situation in Iraq.

"Always look in drawers"

In the recently published account of John Gilkey, Allison Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, which is set to become a classic of its kind, a dealer recounts viewing an auction in London and finding in a bureau drawer a copy of Blake’s Book of Job in which had been tucked his even rarer Song of Liberty. The bureau was estimated at about $2,000, the Job was worth at least $100,000. Obviously rejecting the Gilkey option of trousering the book and walking out of the room with it, the dealer, oddly, decided not to bid for the chest either. He doesn’t say why, but he may have reasoned that someone else had noticed the book and had decided to bid, prompting a bidding war. Or, perhaps someone had opted to steal the book at some point, in which case our friend would need to keep his eyes on the chest almost up to the point of sale. As it was, the dealer informed the auction house of the hidden treasure before the chest was sold. The four-page Song of Liberty was duly removed and later fetched $25,000 at auction. We are not told what happened to the Job.

Re the Tamerlane pamphlet above -

One of the rarest first editions in American literature, Tamerlane and Other Poems , a forty page pamphlet published pseudonymously at his own expense in 1827 by the 17 year old Edgar Allan Poe, was found in a box of agricultural pamphlets in a New Hampshire antiques barn in 1988 by a lucky dealer who recognised its worth and secured it for $15.  Only a dozen copies are said to exist. This one sold not long afterwards at Sotheby’s for $198,000.

Another Thracian treasure found

Bulgarian archaeologists have presented their findings from the tomb of a Thracian aristocrat.

The finds at the lavish Thracian tomb include gold rings, silver cups and vessels coated with gold, and clay vessels. Those include two silver cups with images of love god Eros, and a number of other ornate silver and bronze vessels.

The aristocrat belonged to a rich family descended from the ruling strata in the Odrysian Kingdom (5-3rd century BC).

Several other Thracian treasure troves have been found. What I find most incredible is the quality of the workmanship; many of the items are as skillfully created as anything produced in Renaissance Europe - but these come from 400 B.C.

An unexpected treasure in the Namibian sands

Namibia is of course famous for its diamonds. Recently, while surface-mining the sands, crews discovered a Portugese shipwreck from 1533 - now well inland because of the shifting sands.

The photos (credit Amy Toensing) show the seawall separating the wreck site from the ocean, some of the 50 pounds of gold coins (Spanish, Portugese, Venetian, Florentine, Moorish), and small quantities of liquid mercuty (probably carried on board for the treatment of syphilis).

From a gallery of pix of the shipwreck excavation at National Geographic.

The Staffordshire Hoard

I said yesterday that I wouldn't be double-posting material that I write up for Neatorama, but I'll make an exception for this once-in-a-lifetime event, and because here I can post more of the spectacular photos and append some thoughts of my own.

The news coming out of Britain today is of the greatest treasure hoard ever discovered on the British Isles - perhaps the finest in European history. Found by an amateur with a metal detector, the assemblage totals perhaps 1,500 items (they're still extracting them from lumps of earth), dating to the 7th century.

It's gold and silver, but it's not just coins. Included are clothing accessories, jewelry, and lots of armor- and war-related items. Every item appears to be designed for males, so the supposition is that this was the spoils of battle (or the accumulation of a lifetime in the military). The gold pieces are beautifully crafted with filigree and inlaid precious stones (garnet) and glass.

Pictured above, top to bottom, are a millefiori stud with an inlaid glass mosaic, a gold band with a Biblical phrase (in Latin) from Psalm 67, part of a design of two eagles and a fish, a plaque with stylized interlaced arms, a decorated dagger hilt, and an apparently solid gold buckle and plate.

I've spent a long time trying to wrap my mind around this discovery - reminding myself that this treasure didn't come from the time of Elizabeth. These were made a THOUSAND YEARS before she was on the throne. These predate the Plantagenets and the Normans. This is before King Canute challenged the tide. Before Alfred the Great, for cryinoutloud. These were buried before there were English kings. Before there was an England, if I may be permitted to say such a thing (although I guess there would have been a "Britain.")

Someone buried this treasure during the Dark Ages - a time when one tends to think of men scrabbling about wearing animal skins and fighting with pointy sticks. But behind them on the battlefields there must have been magnificent warriors resplendent in gold and silver and probably elaborate silks and woolens that haven't survived. It boggles my mind.

One other comment, which I may have expressed on this blog before. The Brits are to be endlessly commended for their thoroughly enlightened policy regarding the discovery of buried treasure. The law of the land gives half the value of the find to the person who discovers it. In many (?most) countries the government tries to confiscate anything found or repatriate it to presumed descendents, with the result that magnificent finds like the above from the whole of the world's history are routinely sold on the black market to wealthy people who hide it, or worse yet, melted down for base metal value by "potholers" ravaging archaeologic sites. Kudoes to the Brits for rewarding the finders and preserving their heritage.

Here are some relevant links (including credits for the photos above) -

Link to BBC article with a slideshow of 12 photos.

Link to a gallery of 15 photos at The Guardian.

The Stafforshire Hoard, is the “home page” for the find, which is being co-managed by the British Museum, English Heritage, the University of Birmingham, and others. There are 619 photos at the site, but the server is very slow today - presumably nearly overwhelmed with traffic.

Update Nov 26: The hoard has been appraised at £3,285,000, which will be split between the man who found it and the farmer on whose land it was located.

Is there anyone who doesn't like treasure stories?

Housewife finds £250,000 treasure with metal detector
Mrs Hannaby, 57, from Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, made the discovery while out on one of her regular six-hour Sunday detecting walks... The treasure had been buried four inches below the ground for around 500 years... Roger Bland, head of treasure at the British Museum, describes the item - which at 2.8cm by 2.3cm, is barely larger than a postage stamp - as an "important find", and said he regrets that the museum does not currently have the funds to buy it. As one of only three of its kind to have survived, the find could be worth even more than £250,000, and its engraving is being compared to that of the Middleham Jewel, which sold at auction for £1.3million in 1986 and was later resold to the Yorkshire Museum for £2.5million. [photo credit]

Treasure hunters find Bronze Age axes
An amateur treasure hunter has unearthed a hoard of bronze age axe heads thought to be worth about £80,000... Mr Peirce found dozens more and, over the following two days, he and a colleague, Les Keith, uncovered nearly 500 bronze artefacts dating back 3,000 years.

Treasurer hunters battle over £500,000 hoard
Metal detecting enthusiast Michael Darke, 60, realised he might be on the trail of a major treasure find when he found 10 Iron age coins buried in a meadow... Within an hour of arriving in the field on March 30 last year, the pair had unearthed the remains of an Iron Age pottery cooking pot containing another 773 gold coins.

I am recurrently dismayed that the ancient Romans and Celts didn't lose stuff in Wisconsin. And I wonder how many European and British family fortunes have been started when a farmer plowed up pots full of gold. You just know that this burying and unearthing have been going on for centuries...

Things underwater in New York Harbor

23. 1,600 Bars of Silver, Weighing 100 Pounds Apiece
In 1903, a barge in the Arthur Kill—the oily, mucky arm of the harbor between Staten Island and New Jersey—capsized, spilling its cargo of silver ingots. It carried 7,678 bars; about 6,000 were recovered soon after. The rest are still down there. At today’s prices, they’re worth about $26 million. Every now and then, someone tries to find them. So far, no luck.

24. Ice-cream Trucks
...In 1969, in order to build a new artificial reef, the Department of Environmental Conservation dumped a bargeload of scrapped Good Humor trucks off Atlantic Beach, where they were eventually joined by (according to the DEC) “30,000 tires in three-tire units; 404 auto bodies; nine barges; the tug Fran S; a steel lifeboat; steel crane and boom; surplus armored vehicles; concrete slabs, pipes, culvert, decking and rubble; 530,000 cubic yards of rock from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers excavation project.”

A couple dozen more items listed at New York magazine.

The wreck of the HMS Victory has been found

This is not the HMS Victory that was Lord Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar; that one is in dry dock in England as a floating museum.

This HMS Victory was that one's predecessor - a 100-gun ship-of-the-line. In 1744 while traversing the English Channel on a return voyage, she encountered stormy weather and was damaged on the Casquets, but did not sink immediately, having now been found over 50 miles away. At least 900 men went down with her when she sank, including some of the cream of the British navy.

The images above are from a photo gallery at Der Spiegel. The top one shows 12-pound and 42-pound cannon - brass, mind you, and not iron - and therefore virtually pristine and uncorroded. The second image shows an unsuccessful attempt to insert a floppy disk into the cannon barrel. The final image shows the emblem of King George I emblazoned on the cannon, identifying the time period of the wreck.

Oh, one other point of interest. When she went down, she was carrying 4 tons of gold coins. Four TONS of gold coins. 100,000 gold Portugese coins...