How old does something have to be before it stops being trash and starts being an archaelogical find you should leave?

Well, there is "archaeological" and "historical". Not everyone's trash is historical. If Lewis and Clark left it, thats historical. If some poor slob like you or me left it then it is not. Depends on what is left, too. Camp 4 in Yosemite qualified for the National Historical Registry. It did not so much as its "age" but as its significance to the history of climbing in this country. So if you find trash that you may think is a significant part of the history of the Sierra, then maybe. For example, you find an old axe with Clarence Kings name on it. A few years ago I found some old glass bottles up near South Fork Lake. They looked like early 1900's. Rusted tin cans- hard to say. Most are just trash. Trash at a mining site may have some historical value.

Archaelogical implies age. This stuff has to be OLD. Clarence King does not qualify. Indians do. Very early Indians more so. Arrowheads-photograph them, locate on a map, leave them be and then tell someone at a University.

My policy is to take a photograph and locate the spot then report to the FS or National Park Service.

Actually, there is a standard - fifty years. But there is flexibility. At fifty years, you should consider its potential for historical value and not everything will qualify, but a lot will, like Camp 4 (actually of lot of its history is more than fifty years old). It is a tricky question and one that the NPS and other agencies have to consider carefully - it is easy to screw up when you are dealing with material in the gray zone. The best procedure is to be careful and thoughtful; check with someone responsible before taking any drastic action.

Some sites (Cape Canaveral, for example) can be deemed historically important well before they reach fifty years of age....

In my archaeological career, I have dealt with material more than 13,000 years old,, but also a lot of stuff that was much younger - Fort Bowie, AZ, 100 years of less when we worked there. The youngest material I have dealt with was a navy dive bomber that crashed off Santa Cruz Island the year I was a junior in high school. There is quite a lot that is worth preserving that is not particularly old.

I would disagree with one of WD's points. Historical material doesn't have to be associated with famous people to be significant; actually everyone's trash does have historical [/u]potential[u], at a very minimum.

Back when I was young and less concerned about such things I would carve my name into a tree and date it 1845 or so. It seemed funny at the time. Imagine if someone thought they found something historical.

Yesterday, I found these simple cans out in the prairie:


To me, along with other cans in the area, they tell a story of an old party or maybe camp. Who eats sardines today? Notice the beer can is the old kind you use a churchkey opener for. They haven't been around since the early 70's as I recall. At this time, it would have been a couple miles from town.

I'm not so sure why poor slobs should be forgotten and rich slobs remembered.

Around here the law says '50 years'. The nature preserve I care for was once a farm. The homestead, which burnt years ago, is behind my house, deep in the trees. The house is not much older than WWII vintage, had galvanized steel plumbing, indoor bathroom porcelain complete with metal shower pan, and all sorts of old farm debris laying around including a huge fuel tank which rusted and fell. I can't "legally" remove any of it. There are even federal procedures on how to preserve and build trails across the old barbwire fences (some of which were strung when I was in grade school). Can't cut them.
I've found (with the brush mower! )plenty of old bottles and cans that predate ring-pull tabs and are now considered artifacts.

It is fun, while hiking in the desert, to come across trash from the old cattle drive days and some of the wood/iron structures. The desert preserves everything for centuries. I've found old license plates from the 20's, tools, bed frames, etc.

The bain of metal detectors are those old 1970's ring pulls! But, because they were only around 3-4 years, you can accurately date the trash site. Post 'church key', pre "button pops"....which bloodied lots of knuckles.

Who eats sardines today?

Topic drift alert! Because you ask, I hear that sardines are making a comeback among people like endurance athletes, weight lifters, and just your garden variety 'health nuts'. For myself, I don't eat them very often, but I do eat them.

Lets just make the thread drift official. Mmmmmmmm, sardines packed in olive oil. Yum! Kinda messy for backpacking though...

Now lets reel it back in...In Guam, we had one of my studies stopped because of some 500 year old trash, but mainly because my health and safety officer went and found some human teeth. That really caused a ruckus, until they determined that the teeth were only Japanese. At that point everyone relaxed and we were allowed to continue with the study. But we found all sorts of stuff from the fight to liberate Guam, most of it not considered of interest at the time. There are (were) pottery sherds all over Guam and people didn't seem to care a whole lot about those either.

Me. Got a problem with that?

Lol, just teasing. I do like sardines, especially with saltine crackers. I like the ones in spring water best, but I also like the ones in hot sauce and in olive oil. I also have discovered kippered snacks and even anchovys.

As for your official question, I think the others have answered it better than I can.

I went back out today looking for stuff.

Here is a map of the route made with a compass and pacing. The stars are where I made interesting finds.


By the stars on the NE side, I found a can with a pull top.


And 30 feet away I found this old canteen which I think dates from the late 60's or before.


Next time the challenge will be to see if I can find them again.

For me, one of the joys of bushwhacking around here is there are so many artifacts from so many years you can stumble across. I've never came across anything that would make oldranger want to fly out here and catalog it, but I get still get excited when I run across the little, common, stuff. Flakes from arrowheads being made and old bottles and beer cans are all fun to find.

If I ever did find something exciting I'd call the ranger's offices, but I just leave them all where I find them, it would be like taking the fun out of the forest to remove them. And now and then, far away from any trail, I leave a coin under a small stack of rocks for some future bushwhacker to find. I hope they get found too, but not for a long time

Don't worry. Since you are carving the dates into a living tree, it will be fairly easy to determine that the carving is a fairly recent date and could not possibly date that early. If you choose just the right kind of conifer, a good analysis could determine the year and the season of year in which you made the carving.

Example: A site we found in Canyon de Chelly gave some good tree ring dates, and we learned that all the timbers used in its construction were cut in the late fall, 324 CE.

The first pop tops were marketed in 1962, although church keys continued in use for a few years afterward. Looks like first half of the 20th century stuff as a first approximation.

Early in my career, i spent a lot of time around beer cans....

Gads man I remember church key cans and then the steel pull tabbers! So am I a artifact at age 47? I understand certain things have historic relavance, but a tin can found in a field is just rusty metal in my book. Find a hatchet head and arrow heads made of flint and stone, now thats artifacts. For me the rest is just limited individuals holding on too memories. I have allot of antique furniture. No I didnt buy it when I was a KID! Antiques, are 100 years old. after age 25 collectors items! See I am a collectors item! How much will you pay? LOL
Just kidding not pandering! Historic, value is a different animal!

I remember seeing my first pull tab and thinking-"That is going to be an excellent time marker, as indeed pull tabs are turning out to be. The thing to carry away is that archaeology is just a set of techniques for drawing conclusions about how people behaved from the stuff they left behind. The techniques can be applied at any point in the past.

One of my professors demonstrated this be literally inventing the field of garbology - systematically studying the waste stream of materials in the trash cans of our town. His results have been of great interest to marketers, because the archaeology shows what people often did, not what they said they did - folks in our town actually drank a lot more booze than they admitted,for example. As a sort of reward for pawing through all that trash, they did indeed find a very exquisite, expensive diamond ring. Why was that thrown out?

At one point, I did some law enforcement training, a major portion of which was crime scene investigation. As an archaeologist, I was right at home. Many of the techniques are identical. The major difference is that an archeo's field notes will not be scrutinized and questioned by an attorney on cross examination, which can be a real nasty experience.

I guess I should get back to your question "Am I an artifact at age 47?" You are not, but you are on your way. If it any comfort, I am further down that road than you are. Eventually we will all belong to the archaeologists of the future.

Here's a story I wrote about ten years ago:

Moonshine Still

My neighbor laughed at me when he read it, said I found an old trash heap, so I took him there. I could be wrong, a lot of the stuff there was half buried and I didn't dig anything up, but even he thought I might be right after he visited it. There were a lot of broken mason jars, and the tin lids for them, and a lot of other bottles too. Even if I'm wrong, it was fun to postulate.

In that story I also talk about a long pile of rocks I found. That puzzled me for a long time, but I finally learned that is was rocks from land cleared to grow crops. Since then I've seen rocks piled for the same purpose, though not always as neatly piled as those ones are. What is amazing about these rock piles it how many rocks were moved, and some of them are big. They are a true testament to hard work, if not a successful farm.

Oldranger, it'd be a thrill to hang out with you around here. You'd see so much more than I do, I think you'd find the area interesting too.

I would say your story is quite plausible. Careful excavation could test your notion. I would bet your idea would be verified.

We have rock piles on Santa Cruz Island as well, created by the same process. I agree with you - it is a huge amount of work to create some farmland.

I had the opportunity to participate in an archaeological "dig" while in college. A farmer had uncovered some indian artifacts while plowing, so he had contacted "authorities". Apparently our professor was the local expert. Anyway, we excavated the field in 5'x5' squares. The first day was just shoveling dirt into sifters until we got down to the plow lines. We sifted out a pile of bone, flint and pottery pieces. when we got to the plow line, we then began the scraping, and logging the artifacts location, depth etc... We didn't find noahs ark, but we did get the outline of some sort of structure and a few more interesting artifacts. One in particular got our professor all in a tizzy. Apparently the artifact had a well known symbol but was until now never found in this particular area. IIRC, it was a symbol for the "birth of the iroquois confederacy". Anyway, he was all excited and I will never forget the experience.

Sorry for the thread-drift.

50 years, huh? Then I guess I'd qualify - so if you see me lying on the ground beside the trail, don't wake me up or move me. I'm just taking a nap.

Bill,

Loved your webpage. You have a knack for hiking in an area instead of hiking through it. It is a different experience.

Glenn,

Now you have done it. SAR teams will no longer rescue people over 50 because we are artifacts. We can get Oldranger working on changing the government regulations.

When I was a kid/teenager I was really into going through old homesteads to collect the old bottles and snuff jars. I've got boxes of them to this day. I owned, and still own a good metal detector and had a blast digging up old tools, square head nails, etc. Some of the old dwellings pre-dated the Alamo and for Texas, that was some old stuff. I worked a summer in Louisville, Ky and was taken in by a pro bottle digger. There I learned how to spot old privies and trash dumps at construction sites. The river traffic brought down amazing things that go back to the early 1700's, that were tossed in those pits. A couple of "eagle flasks" were unearthed which were the holy grail of bottles back then.
I still occasionally dig around in the homestead behind the house. There have been native American burial sites discovered around here, which get 'un-discovered' real quick to avoid vandals. There is a field near here that is an arrow head mine....every year when the owner plows, you can spot the points as the sun glints off them. I have no idea why so many are in that one spot.
Ain't old trash fun! Imagine the delight of archaeologists 1000 years from now, after they strike a current day landfill.

No, actually SAR teams will redouble their efforts...Age increases value. Ladies, marry an archaeologist - the older you get, the more interested in you he will become.

In my wanderings today, I found this part to an old sheetmetal Scotch Tape dispenser. The Scotch website gives the impression these were only made in 1939. The next year, they went to plastic.

Yesterday in my wanderings, I found this old 78 record. It was number 4 on the hit charts in 1943. I downloaded the mp3 from Amazon. It was worth 99 cents. It's the kind of music my aunt Martha used to have on the radio.

'

I found this old suitcase near it. It had $25,000 in it from an old bank robbery, but someone else got to it first. (OK, I made that up, but I did check inside). Since it was a small trash dump I am guessing it is from the same time.

Those things seem in rather good shape... like they were dumped recently. The record label doesn't seem very weathered. I would think after one summer, the sun would bleach it until it was no longer readable. The suitcase seems to be sitting on top of the ground not buried into it with grass growing up around it.