Odd/Cool Metal Detecting Finds

Well, I've been detecting once with a friend of mine and we were in Kansas then. We found a square foot of iron and a conglomerate chunk of zinc. Nothing too interesting, but these were the biggest finds.

My oddest find was from about 15 years ago. I was digging in the bush surrounding
a small neighborhood park. The park was over a hundred years old at the time and would have existed at a time when there were very few houses in the area.

It was late fall and getting cold. I had gotten a signal which, on my White's Eagle, was showing 8-10 inches in depth. I could tell it was large (4" or more in width) and I had visions of it being a buried metal box. I had just broken my trowel and all I had was a screwdriver that I was using as a probe. I dug through the loose dirt and then the soil turned to hard clay. I was freezing but the target was keeping me going. In about 15 minutes, I found the cause of the signal. It was the metal lid from a large jar. I carefully slid my probe down and I felt the side of the jar. It was still intact! It took a good forty five minutes to dig away enough of the clay for me to see that it was a glass gallon jar. I knew it had to be something good! Why else would someone bury it?

Finally, I had enough of the jar exposed to wiggle it free. The jar was full of murky water and I couldn't see anything inside of it. It was now starting to snow. The lid was rusted it it took a lot of effort to get it to turn. My hands were numb from the cold but I eventually unscrewed lid. I poured out the contents onto the ground and out came a couple of dozen hard eggs!

These were a delicacy to some of the Asian cultures. Thousand year old eggs. You take eggs put them in a jar and bury them for a couple of months and then you dig them up and eat them. Someone had buried these and either forgot where they were or just forgot about them.

It was utterly disgusting!

From wikipedia:

"Century egg, also known as preserved egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg, thousand-year-old egg, and millennium egg (or Pidan in Mandarin), is a Chinese cuisine ingredient made by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice hulls for several weeks to several months, depending on the method of processing."

I think he's probably long gone. There were roots growing above the jar so it had been there a long time before I got there.