Archive for August 25th, 2006
Originally posted at the Collectors Universe forum (link)
Note to Collectors Universe readers: since this mysterious object was originally posted here, and the story evolved on these forums in bits and pieces, you may have already read a lot of it. However, I thought I would sew the pieces of narrative together and write it up as a proper “Digger’s Diary” entry, for posterity. The moderators of the treasurenet.com forums, probably the largest detector and treasure hunting site in the world, have seen fit to include it in their “Best Of TreasureNet” category, alongside some truly remarkable and amazing finds. In fact, they moved the story into the “Best Of Treasurenet” less than an hour after I submitted it for review! I am hoping they will see fit to publish it in Western & Eastern Treasures magazine, which is the granddaddy of detector periodicals. Of course, future inclusion in some sort of publication by the Dr. Siu-Leung Lee mentioned below is probable, as well. Of course, the find appears to be right in the center of a controversy between would-be revisionist historians and other scholars.
DIGGER’S DIARY (1994 & 2006): THE MYSTERIOUS MING MEDALLION
Some time in early 1994, when I lived in the mountains of North Carolina near Asheville, I finally received verbal permission to detect an old churchyard I’d had my eye on for some time. The church was perched atop a large hill. Though a 20th century building occupied the site, there were many old tombstones in the cemetery and according to the sign out front, the original church had been established only a short time after the first white settler, Samuel Davidson, had built a cabin in that area in 1784, and was subsequently killed by the Cherokee, who viewed him as a trespasser. The long-vanished original church was probably a log structure, as were most antebellum buildings in the region. (more…)
