Coins of the New World

Hi! Welcome to the metal detecting show Episode number 23. My name is Ciaran and believe it or not I have been detecting for nearly 30 years. This week I continue my series about the History of Coins where I chat about the Coins of the New world and We have our regular tech time out where this week I compl,ete my series of how to test your metal detector and of course some updates from my adventures in metal detecting. So, let’s get On with the Show. 

Jingle: 

Hey! All befreo we start I  Thank you for listening to my podcast and I hope you enjoy the show this week. If you want to give me feedback or interact with the show, please reach out to me on twitter @detectingthe or Instagram @themetaldetectingpodcast or If you want to pop me an email to ciaran@themetaldetectingshow.com  

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Jingle 

So lets start with my adventures in metal detecting this week, This weekend I attended Irelands first token hunt this year, this hunt was originally scheduled for early March but the relentless march of covid 19 put a quick halt to that back then so once restrictions started to lift we were able to reschedule resulting in over 800 euro being raised for local chancer charities. So some of the listeners may not know what a token hunt is so quickly a token hunt is where the organisers will hide a number of tokens on a site which in our case this was 25 tokens across 3 different fields. These tokens rang up as a solid 15 on the equinox so intiially I imagined this will be easy to distinguish but boy was I wrong as the terrain had quiet a bit of possible green waste which the organisers were not aware of but how could they till we got down to it. This didn’t take from the enjoyment on they day as I didn’t see any complaints but only happy smiling face’s relishing in the challenge to find the tokens. This challenge proved to be difficult with only 9 of the 25 tokens being found one of which was the golden token which was the top prize of a minelab gofind detector which appropiatly went to a young girl on the day who was delighted and it delighted every big burly man there to see it go to her. As 16 tokens remained unfound a draw was carried out to distrubute the remaining prizes resulting in yours turly winning a new finds pouch which at first glance looks to be exacly what I am looking for nice and big a rugged enough to survive any abuse I can trow at it. Big congradulation to all event organisers as the event ran seamlessly and professionally from the start. Before I move off the token hunt a hjuge shout out to NorwayDigger who you will remmember from my recent interview and N11Express who shot some amazing drone footage on the day which you can see if you go to Norway diggers channel ill stick the link to the channel in the show notes. 

So lets talk about the coins of the new world.

What is the New World well a lot of people would be mistaken in thinking it refered to the coins of the US only in fact the New world refers to mainly all of the Americas but predominatly The South America’s 

The New World was discovered or rediscovered in 1492 by Columbus while in search of a trade route to China that would curcumnaviagte  the italian held medatarian. 

In fact Columbus believe that when he landed that he had found india but was very disapointed when he realised he hadnt in fact found indian but somewhere completely new that was blocking a trade route to China. 

initially the portugues and spanish we also very disapointed with the discovery of the Americas so much so they sent several explorers to search for a way around it, but never mind that we are here to talk about coins.

so as you can imagine with the discovery of the Americas that several countries followed in effort to colonise and reap the rewards of untapped resources this obviously resulted in trade and trade routes being formed and from the start the new world coinage at the time came from the homelands of the collinizers of England, Portugal and Spain but as the issuers of the coinage were on the other side of the world this coinages value did not translate and coinage from the old world was deamed initially of lower value resulting in local traders relying on a barter system coupled with Stamped ingots of gold and silver for high value items.

It wasn’t till 1505 that the mainland Spanish mints of Seville and Burgos began minting a series of silver and copper coins specifically for use by the colonies. 

It wasn’t till in 1536, at Mexico City, that a new mint would issue the first coins that were actually struck in the Americas and as you can imagine It didn’t take long for more mints to pop up in the americas such as Santo Domingo and other regions such as lima and Peru, 

These first coins, struck in the name of Charles I (1516-1556) are true works of art with a simple design, with the arms of Castile (castles) and León (lions), flanked by the mintmark and the initial of the assayer on the obverse and the reverse bearing the symbolic Pillars of Hercules above waves with the value and motto PLVS VLTRA which is the Latin for “more beyond” and a declaration in Latin of “Charles and Juana, king and queen of Spain and the Indies.”  These Pillar type coins were clearly produced as a stament that the new world was and always will belong to to the King and Queen of Spain. 

Further new mints constructed at,lima and Peru are credited with having minted the first 8 reales or dollar-sized coin of the New World, whos desgin imitated the first coinage from Mexico.  

Not long after his ascension to the throne, Philip II (1556-1598) changed the design of the coinage to the famous “shield-type” design, which consists of a full Habsburg coat-of-arms on the obverse and a cross with lions and castles in the quadrants on the reverse.

The first gold coins minted in the New World were struck in either Cartagena or Bogota of Columboa in 1622. 

Other colonies were quick to follow minting gold coins to take advantage of the regions vast natural resources in gold. Spanish gold coins from this time were measured in escudos; a two-escudo coin was referred to as a "doubloon." Gold coins were issued in eight-escudo, four-escudo, two-escudo and one-escudo amounts. 

These Dobloons were pressed with the shield type design coninuing the tradition of the same afore mentioned Shield type design with one sligh difference of Fleur de le in the cross quadrants.  Point of note that this is the coin you see in all pirate treasure hunting movies including the greatest movie of all time the Goonies.

This desgin continued through the reign of Philip II and his successors Philip III (1598-1621) and Philip IV (1621-1665) and continuned till 1652 after widespread corruption at the Potosí Mint resulting in the death of the local town mayor and a mint assayer. 

This corruption took the form of coin weight being lighter than planned bringing into question the purity of the coins resulting in a mass recall of the coins to be replaced with what was to become known as transitionals and were commonly known as pillar and waves due to the image of the herculian pillars and waves on the reverse. 

We could talk about the coins of the new world for ages but lets leave it there for this week next week ill take you from the new world to the United states of America. Up next is this weeks tech time out. 

Jingle

Time for this weeks tech time Out!!!!!!

last week I started the discussion on how to best test your detector including airtesting test ing for Sensitivity, Depth and Response. This week I will complete the topic by covering recovery, descriminition and other tests that can be helpful.

So firstly Recovery what is recovery well as I said last week recovery is the speed at which your detector can recover after giving its response. Why is this important this is important to minimise target masking but also to maximise your information resolution to help determine a good find amongst bad signals.

So how do you test for recovery well again in your test bed lay out several targets with one being an old iron target making sure all targets are of similar size lay these targets in equal distance apart say 1 inch and equal depth taking your coil sweap at a constant rate over the targets there is no advantage is going low and slow over the test bed as that will only skew the results resulting in a more favourable outcome.

so make sure to adopt a swing that is as exact as possible to your own swing.  Swinging your coil east to west or visa versa listen for the signals in all metal mode you should here a solid signal for each including   iron if not increase your recovery speed till you can hear all signals now you could do this test by varying the distance between the targets till you can determine the optimal recovery speed for the test but doing it once and adjusting your speed has the advantage of not having to break your back moving targets about.what you are trying to do here is establish a range in your minds eye to what affect adjusting recovery speed has on the performance of your detector. Now you would think that having your recovery speed as high as possible is the best thing to do well actually having it too high only results in a shorter signal time making it difficult to determine the iron in the swing. So often misused recovery now you know how to use it and test for it.

Next up is descrimination: you never here of any body testing for descrimination so what are we testing when we are testing descrimination obviously we are testing the detectors ability to block an iron signal. so think about the times you have dug up an iron signal when you wanted to block them out, 9 times out of ten you dug it because of two reasons 1. it was not completely iron in other words it was some alloy even some jewelery has some iron in it or 2 the target was so big the detector couldn’t ignore it . so think about it to test we are going to use various sizes of iron objects increasing in size till the detector can no longer ignore it and present it as a good signal. To do the test accuratley you will need to test at various sensitivities but for this example lets do the test at your default sensitivity. Again in the test bed bury several Iron objects at the same depth. Set your detector to descriminate out the Iron move through the test bed with a standard swing till you hit a target that your detector cant descriminate out this will give you an idea of the size of target that will over come descrimination not much use as you can use profile switching to help you determine a finds Iron content but still a test.

Lastly what other tests can be done well with the age of modern metal detector moving toward wireless connection test your detector with both wired headphones and wireless and try to determine if there is a lag is response this can be subjective but worth noting that some bluethooth protocols are quiet slow which can affect your ability to pinpoint affectivly.

Battery life other than keeping you detector on nonstop and timeing it make sure to note how long you get from the battery on both your detector and headphones.

Test the physical aspect of the detector are the connnections of good quality is the screen scratch resistant are the shafts prone to wear. How heavy is the detector where is its center of gravity. On and on and On .

And that’s it for this weeks tech time out. 

Outro

Wrap Up 

Ok I hope you liked this episode of the metal detecting show podcast 

I want to thank the website https://www.amnh.org/ from which i have quoted heavily from and drawn a lot of my information for this week's topic. 

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Once again, I hope you have enjoyed this episode and we will chat to you all again next week. 

Get out there Eyes Down and Happy Hunting.