During the 17th and 18th century, the backbone of North American economy was the furtrade. The abundant availability of furs in the New World created a new fashion in France and spread to the rest of Europe. The competition between the various trading nations created a sellers market for the man who trapped the animals. The main supplier of furs was the Indian.

The Indian culture was not attuned to the acquisition of coin and notes as personal wealth. The Indian dis-played his wealth on his person as weapons and jewelry.
A wealthy Indian would carry a musket, sword and axe. His clothes were festooned with brooches and beads Braidholders, headbands adorned his hair. Bands of silver or brass encircled his arms and fingers. From his ears and nose hung earrings, some-times a foot long. The sunlight would turn him into a glittering display of wealth.

The demand for silver to use as trade items was great. The scarcity of post revolutionary silver coinage can be attributed to fur trade. Often these coins are recovered in Indian village sites, holed, as to be worn as ornaments. Silver plate was cut into small pieces to be traded. The touchmark of the original silversmith will some-times be found on a small piece of silver that was used as an earring.

Touchmarks are small designs stamped into a piece of silverware to denote the maker, his hometown, the date of manufacture and the verification that it is silver. A lion, one paw raised, was the equivalent of the modern, "Sterling." A letter was used to represent the date. The style of the letter was changed when the sequence of the alphabet had terminated.

These marks can help to date a site. For those wishing to obtain a book that may help them in this aspect, I would recommend A Dictionary of Marks by Margaret Macdonald-Taylor.

The various expeditions against the Indian tribes by the white man resulted in much of the personal wealth of the Indians to be hidden or buried. Often the villages were destroyed and its inhabitants scattered or killed. Many of these caches were never recovered.
This knowledge has led me to search the areas of historic Indian villages. Every spring will find me tramping through plowed fields, metal detector in hand, looking for a poten-tial site. I feel fortunate that every year I manage to turn up one good discovery. This year it was what I call, "The man with bells."

A good friend and I had been hunt-ing in a plowed field that had pro-duced several small pieces of trade brass and numerous musketballs. We had been hunting this field for five days. On a hunch, we decided to spend what was left of the day detecting the adjoining woods.

Within a short time we recovered a broken trade axe, several musket-balls, pieces of trade brass and a tinkl-er. A tinkler is a brass or copper thim-ble that the Indian would punch a hole in the closed end and hang on his clothes. Several of these thimbles would result in a tinkling sound as the person moved.

Tom and I separated to locate a concentration of artifacts. Every-thing I found was broken. Feeling discouraged, I decided to rejoin Tom.

There was no sign of him in the area that I had left him searching, so I called his name. He replied from a short distance to my right. "I think I found something," he remarked. Beside him lay two green spheres. He emerged from the area a clump of dirt in hand. As the dirt fell away, I saw he had a stone pipe about six inches in length.

I needed no encouragement to join him in searching the area for more finds. As we worked, he explained that he had gotten a very slight tone change that at first he thought was a ground reading. He had gone on a short distance and thought about it. He knew that his Daytona GBD did not read the ground and decided to go back and probe a hole. He probed and the reading was still there. He found the first bell. The green spheres I had noticed were large round bells.

Bells appeared to be the name of the game. Large bells, small bells, round bells, domed bells, and one after another emerged from the hole. Each bell recovered was carefully checked for anything unusual. They appeared to have been fastened with a heavy wood fiber cord. Two bells with a mass of fiber gave us our first clue to what the bells had been fastened. It appeared to be a heavy woven material much like bark fiber. Later investigation showed that the Indians of the area wore woven mantles or capes of bark fiber. We assume that this was the type of garment to which the bells were attached.
At this point we were sifting through the sandy soil with our hands in fear of damaging a buried artifact with a hard probing tool. Even with our hands we worked gently, our fingers probing for any hard object. We were rewarded with a clay pipe followed by a round bottom cup of low-fired clay. Exuberant probing with a metal dig-ging tool would have badly damaged these items. When later dated, the pipe was determined to have been made around 1720.

I felt a corroded object that was long and flat. It seemed small for a gun barrel. If you are a knowledgeable relic hunter, you never try and pull a relic out of the ground. As I cleared the earth from around the rusted object, I realized that it was a sword. Careful recovery resulted in a whole sword, whereas prying would have produced two pieces of a sword. Later research indicated it as being a hunting sword of European manufacture about 1720-1740. Careful cleaning resulted in portions of the maker's name being found on the blade. What we have at the present is as follows; Side 1, A_TIA _ _ _R, Side 2, Il_TOL_ _

If you are interested in cryptograms you may wish to work on ours. I suspect that the sword may have been made in Toledo, Spain.

A few more bells and a trade axe completed the large metal signals our detectors indicated. The smaller items began to appear. When we left for the day, the list of items recovered stood as:

33 Round bells
11 domed bells
I European Hunting Sword
1 Trade axe
I Stone pipe
1 Clay pipe
6 musketballs
4 Silver earrings
1 3" x 4" Piece of Glass
I Touchstone
3 Brass buckles
I Low-fired clay cup
4 French style brass buttons
4 Gunflints

When we returned the following day, Tom went directly to yesterday's site to recheck the dirt and refill the hole properly. He was able to locate another half dozen buttons. These buttons were changing into a mineral state and were very difficult to detect. Jay and I spread out to check other potential areas. My luck was still holding, all bad. The only thing that I could find was poison ivy.

When I located Jay and Tom, the former had uncovered a broken sword with a brass handle and a trade axe. The earth they had been lying in was abundant with glass beads. Jay was filling a bucket with the earth to later pan out the beads. The sword was an English Hanger, circa 1690-1710. It has a simple knuckle bow that divides to join an oval counterguard having raised cherub and floral patterns.

A short distance from Jay I got a signal that turned out to be a tinkler. Further detecting the area produced another tinkler and I proceeded in that direction. My concentration was broken by a shout behind me. Jay had uncovered a silver armband three feet from where I had found the first tinkler. The armband was three inches wide a touchmark that designated as being sterling, made in London, England in 1720. With it were numerous glass and silver beads. Jay set out for the van to get another bucket to contain the dirt. The armband had only been two inches deep.

The armband turned out to be the last major find of the week. The following week the farmers were seeding the fields ending our hunting until next spring.