Posted by Tom_in_CA on 3/23/2008, 8:47 am, in reply to "Re: How to test iron masking!"
75.23.133.146
this depends on the type of site. If targets are spread out enough, and not too deep, I'd say it's possible to totally hammer a site. What you're saying (about 50 to 90% of good targets un-recovered) would only go for sites with significant enough iron debri and/or some targets being out-of-range.
Micro-example: there is a turn-of-the-century park in my town. In the center of the park is a sandbox, that is about 30 to 40 yards around (pretty big). When I first started detecting in the 1970s, we found ..... as technology started going deeper and deeper, that, if a person got deep enough to go below the looser sand, he could get older coins deeper. Wheats, silver, etc... So we pounded it pretty hard, listening for the deepest whispers, even if meant going into all-metal VLF or whatever. Ultimately, there came a time when got no more such deepies. Fast forward to the mid '90s though, and I passed by the park one day to see that tractors had scraped out down to the older levels (1 to 1.5 ft. of sand taken off) to make way for all-new play equipment being installed. I hopped into the scrape, and found perhaps 3 or 4 more coins (an IH, few mercs and wheats, etc..) is all I could manage. Hardly any signals, not even iron, etc.. Thinking back to the hundreds of oldies we'd found there ~20 yrs. earlier, it was apparent that we'd done a pretty good job of strip-mining it.
But yeah, there's other sites I have in mind (relicky iron-riddled ruins sites, deep-lush-turf at super old parks, etc...) that if the similar thing happened, it would be like a virgin site all over again.
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