Do You Really Want To Hunt Deeper?

For almost everyone in this hobby -- and not necessarily those of us who are totally brand new -- there ultimately comes a day when we start wondering if we’re not as successful as we think we should be because our mid-priced detector is missing the deep targets. This is the point where we start thinking about selling our current detector (which finds more clads and beach jewelry than we know what to do with) for a deeper-seeking detector costing several hundred dollars more.

Before you actually trade in your crippled old nag (which at this point is pretty much what our detectors start looking like to us) for a big honkin’ pasture stud, you should first consider whether you really want to seek deeper than the average one- to five inch level where the vast majority of targets are found. The answer, important only to those who want to save themselves a lot of time, trouble and out-and-out grief, is no.

Other than the reasons I’ll get to later, your perceived lack of success most likely has nothing to do with your detector. It’s you. The most common of the countless ways in this hobby to pee into the wind are:

You’re hunting sites which don’t have the kinds of coins and relics that give us huge Detectorist Woodies when we see the stuff other people find, you’re writing off perfectly productive areas as too inconsequential or too small to be worth your time, or you’re not doing any research.
You’re hunting parts of beaches where the fewest people swim or spread blankets. You’re hunting the areas of parks where people are least likely to take money out of their pockets and drop it. You’re not hunting the sleeper spots, such as around telephone booths, kiddie playgrounds, grassy areas between the street and sidewalks. Things like that. Stuff isn’t going to just jump out of the ground and bite you on the rear end. You have to know where -- and how -- to look for it first.

Your technique isn’t what it ought to be.
To find the deep stuff, you need to work slowly and thoroughly simply because deeper stuff is, by science and technology, much easier for your coil to miss than the shallow stuff. Targets at six or seven inches may be at the outer edges of your unit’s capabilities, but they’re certainly not out of range, especially if you’re not in highly mineralized soil or unusually trashy areas. You just need to work the ground more thoroughly and methodically by overlapping your swings much tighter than usual. Walking around briskly and waving your coil like you’re chasing snakes is not going to get you the deep stuff.

You’re driving a Mercedes (or at least a decent used Chevy Blazer) of a metal detector with Yugo-grade headphones.
This is especially true if you’re using those cheap-ass things that came with the made-in-China Walkman knock-off that died a week after you bought it at the flea market. Deep targets don’t scream. They whisper. Therefore, a high-quality set of ‘phones are a total must. If you prefer the open-air Walkman-type headphones to those hulking earmuff headphones like I do, head down to a serious home stereo showroom and buy a pair of open-air, non-plastic headphones built for drop-dead serious audio performance, such as the Koss Porta Pro. These will set you back about $60 with tax, but you won’t miss hearing a deep signal because you were too busy being a miser.

Your expectations are wrong or too high to begin with.
This is related closely to Reason 1. You expect more beachgoers to have lost more rings in the water than they really have. You expect to find high-quality relics at old sites. You expect to find enough lost jewelry at ball fields to make ball fields a priority on your list when there are actually much better places to hunt. Things like that.

But the main reason most of us really don’t want to be digging targets buried deeper than six or seven inches is because recovering them is far more time- and effort-intensive than most of us are prepared to deal with, especially while swimming in our own sweat in the middle of summer. And depending on where you’re doing the digging, dredging up the really deep stuff will get you more grief from property owners than most of us are prepared to deal with, too.

In the July 1999 issue of Western & Eastern Treasures is a story entitled, "Relic Hunting Colonial Homesites: Tips & Techniques." Page 14 carries a photo of the author’s hand pointing to a crotal bell (a crotal bell resembles a sleigh bell or those little jingle bells people on cat collars so you know when those godforsaken creatures are approaching) nestled in the eight-inch-deep hole from which it was dug. This crotal bell is slightly smaller than a ping pong ball, but the dug hole is approximately the diameter of a basketball.

When I saw this, my first thought was, "Jeez. That’s a whole lot of digging for such a little thing." But then again, the author might’ve been from Texas, where they do everything in a big way anyhow. My second thought was for the physical well-being of the author, since people who dig holes like that tend to end up walking around with a load of buckshot in their pants compliments of angry property owners.

Such a reaction from a property owner, while a bit extreme, wouldn't be entirely unwarranted, either. Put yourself in a property owner’s shoes: Would you really want to see someone, particularly a stranger, digging basketball-sized holes on your property? (I know my immediate relatives wouldn’t, and they’ve known and liked me for almost 40 years.) You can take all the care in the world to fill that kind of a hole like a seasoned expert, but there’s something psychologically alarming about seeing someone who appears to be well on their way to searching for the lost continent of Atlantis. There are property owners who get bent out of shape seeing us dig thee-inch plugs and to us, it may seem like they're overreacting because we know we aren’t doing any damage, but to a homeowner, we might as well be digging for King Tut.

And simply filling those kinds of monster-donster holes to everyone’s satisfaction isn’t the only thing that counts. Unless it’s spring or fall (when appreciable and consistent stretches of soaking rain occur), the circular patch of grass you dig (or even cut a trapdoor plug on) is going to die, leaving the homeowner with a fine collection of circular brown or yellow patches dotting his lawn all summer. This is why detectorists with an iota of consideration for others don’t hunt lawns between late spring and fall, even if the homeowners says he doesn’t care about the way his grass looks.

Consideration aside, there’s one inescapable reason why the majority of you really don’t want to go about finding things anywhere near the one-foot level. When you go digging up things that deep, you’ve crossed the line between casual detecting and archaeology. Quite plainly, digging up something that deep is one massive pain in the ass unless you’re on the beach.

Here’s why: The hole you need to dig will need to be roughly one and a half times the diameter of the object’s depth. In other words, if an object is eight inches down, you'll need to dig a hole 12 inches wide; even wider for larger objects. This is because you need to remove a good bit of soil from around a target to keep from damaging it with your digging tool, or to keep the sides of the hole from falling in. But mainly, it’s impossible to just dig a hole straight down after the first few inches because a straight-down hole doesn’t provide the leverage angle a shovel or hand trowel head needs for removing more soil. If you've ever dug a post hole with a spade, you'll know what I'm talking about. It’s an inescapable rule of science: The deeper you need to dig, the wider you need to dig.

The only tool which will allow you to dig a tidy, straight-down core of a hole is a bulb planter (commonly used to plant tulip bulbs), which looks like a tapered, hollowed-out beer can with a flattened U-shaped handle across the top. The reason you’re able to dig straight down with a bulb planter is because the force and leverage is applied directly from above and the soil is compacted neatly into the open part of the tool. I tested bulb planters as a recovery tool when I first started detecting, and they do indeed provide a nice, tidy hole and an easy way to remove your target from the clump of dirt they remove. They also do indeed kill grass. Luckily for me, my wife didn’t see me using it on our lawn and I was able to pass off the circular dead-grass spots as the calling cards of our next door neighbor’s unleashed dogs who have favored our lawn as a latrine even before we moved in.

Another thing to consider is the types of things you'll be recovering from eight to 12 inches down, especially from old home sites. A good many targets will be junk, plain and simple, that have no value to anyone but you. Are chunks of shoe buckle or a piece of flintlock pistol worth anything to collectors, especially when they come out of the ground caked with corrosion or are so common they have no appreciable value on the open market? No. A Minie ball makes a nice first find, but beyond that, they’re a dime a dozen unless you happen to plan on digging them up by the boatload and selling them for a buck apiece to kids and Yankees west of the Appalachians who would never have the opportunity to dig one up.

A lot of us like to think we’re doing something special because if something's old, there's a certain level of historic value attached to it, and it's better off being dug up than being left in the ground to rot. Such thinking is, by and large, highly misplaced. Mankind won't suffer because of all the Barber dimes, Confederate belt buckles and "good for" tokens left undug. Most of all, age doesn't necessarily equate value, be it historic or monetary. Rarity does.

Sure, a Minie ball found lodged in a piece of human bone once attached to the arm or leg of a Civil War soldier before it was sawed off by a battlefield doctor is highly appreciated because of its inherent ghoul factor, but by and large the rest of the world really isn’t impressed by most of the crap we dig up, and it wouldn’t give us a dime for it unless it happened be junk containing gold or diamonds. Come to think of it, it isn’t too easy selling the gold and silver rings we find at the beach for a good buck, either.

All in all, a great percentage of the things we dig up really don’t have the far-flung emotional appeal we in this hobby like to imagine they do. Homeowners are even less inclined to have romantic notions about our finds, particularly if it looks like we’re fixing to start a new cemetery in their yards. A fair percentage of us will hold an 1850s five-cent piece in our hand and imagine it falling out of the pocket of some battle-weary Civil War grunt walking home barefoot, cold and hungry to his wife and children (who he hasn’t seen in three years), and this coin was all the money he had in the world before he lost it. (Heck, for the sake of romance, let’s make that a battle-weary Civil War grunt walking home on one leg because he had the other blown off by a Hotchkiss shell.) A less-than-happy property owner, on the other hand, would be more apt to think, "You dug a pit in my front yard for THAT?!?!?"

Certainly, there may be buried objects of true monetary, historic or universal interest, such as gold and silver coins (which pretty much come out of the ground the same condition as they went in because they aren’t affected by the elements like copper and brass) and some rarer Civil War-era relics which may indeed be worth making basketball-sized holes over. The things you have to weigh carefully before you go digging up someone’s lawn in a large way are: 1) Whether your research (including talking at length with the owners) and the lay of the land give you a very good reason to believe those kinds of valuables most likely exist there, and 2) Being able to carefully read the size of the target (and possibly what it’s made of if you have a meter) before you dig. Not every property you get permission to hunt is worth hunting in the first place, and your time may be better spent on more, higher-quality finds at other old homes down the road.

Remember, just because a site is old doesn’t guarantee there’s anything old to be found, and just because something’s old doesn’t mean it has any real value to it. After all, there are plenty of coin shops and antiquities dealers where you can buy Roman coins minted when Christ was knee high to a grasshopper by the handful for a dollar or less apiece. Not only that, but find for find, the greatest number and concentration of higher-value artifacts will be found a few feet down in the old outhouse holes and trash pits. That kind of depth and the fact most won't even be made of metal means you'll never even run across them with your garden variety detector.

It is exactly for this reason smart detectorists will hunt homes built during or just after 1900 to 1920 or old foundation ruins and cellar holes in the woods. Homes built just after the turn of the century have the highest likelihood of having coins and tokens minted between the late 1800s and today, and they’ll be in the typical one- to five-inch range. Targets this shallow can be recovered without much effort or lawn damage. Foundation ruins and cellar holes in the woods can handle deep-recovery holes because, well, there’s no homeowner there to scream at you for excavating a hole deep and wide enough to hide a Buick.

However, even at these sites, it’s still necessary to fill your holes completely and expertly, no matter how large or small they happen to be. Not filling holes -- even deep in the bowels of public forest preserves -- or not filling them well is why we end up getting screwed out of detecting on public lands. If you have the good fortune to hunt unconstrained in your local public parks and forests, it’s only because one of our more dim-witted detecting compatriots hasn’t been there yet, so don’t be the first one to go ruining a good thing for yourself and other detectorists in your area.

So if your detector has ever turned anything five or six inches down, you ain't missing much. If your finds haven’t been the quality or quantity you think they should be, think first about whether you need to trade in your current detecting and research techniques for better ones before trading in your detector for a so-called better one. Like the saying goes, a poor workman always blames his tools.