Forest Depot

Greetings to all hunters

I finally got around to putting the depot find into the club. Some artifacts have been posted separately in the finds and with scale. I am adding a few extra photos not yet posted, the bronze balsamaria bottle is the most interesting, but the bronze lattice pendant is the one that catches my personal eye the most. Below are the circumstances of the find previously published: sometime in late October it was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon and after a few meters in the woods a wild boar. I have met many of them in my life and one even took a shot at me, it was wounded and small. After a few more steps I heard a deep loud grunt from deep in the woods. In the hillsides and ravines it was multiplied. I had never heard such a sound. It must be a boar like a pig, or a cow :-).

I've even jumped up a tree in front of wild boars. Dressed in full detectorist regiment, it wouldn't have been easy. No one's gonna get me there today. I put the car in reverse and prefer to vacuum the edge of the forest, along which the asphalt road runs. The wild boar was mating, grunting, and his deep voice attracted mates. Well, then one of the other Sunday afternoons came and I headed to the same spot, but this time further into the woods. It was the first Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2019. I was walking along a forest path paved with basalt, detector on, but on my shoulder. Have you ever dug into a path paved with basalt? I've grown out of it. I know the terrain there very well, especially from mushroom hunting. There's a small bank next to the forest road and a shallow ditch about 20 metres beyond it. That's where I want to search. I'm almost there, the path approaches a larger, also paved path, and suddenly I see a freshly installed protected area (rare fauna) sign on the ditch. Oh, shit. There's still fresh, unbroken clay around the post. Well, I can't go there, and I won't, too bad. I reverse and veer off the road along the bottom of the hill to where the old maps mark the path. I had noticed it on an old map a few weeks ago and never thought while mushrooming that it could lead up such a hill, through such a steep chute. So the detector goes down and it takes about a minute. Two or three shovel shots later, it all rolled out. Depot. I'm talking again, damn it. Immediately I'm happy about the find, of course... Pump pumps, hands shaking, simultaneous stress of how it's going to be with the surrender. I can see into the valley from all sides, so I collect all 12 artifacts and go to the top of the hillside of a nearby ravine to check it out in peace. I wasn't expecting to beep just the bronze, but actually, given the hilly and rolling nature of the landscape and a Celtic pottery shard here and there in the surrounding land, some greenery was to be expected. That I wouldn't hand it over didn't even occur to me.

I often take a photo of the find and now nothing, it wasn't until I was up there on that hillside that I realised. I'm not going back and arranging it. Next time. Hopefully there will be a next time. That proverbial beginner's luck. Reporting and handing in the depot to the archaeologists went without a hitch in the end, and so a stone fell from my heart. They have no documented continuous Celtic settlement at this site, so it was probably an accidental deposition. In addition, I was gifted with several interesting books about the depots found in our region and a card for free admission to exhibitions and displays at the Museum of East Bohemia in Hradec Králové. I have to apologize for not very good photos. I was driving to and from work in the dark. I have a promised photo documentation from the museum so I will add it here later. And I will add the artifacts gradually. I have several hours of LP registration so I'm not experienced at this. During the follow-up with the archaeologists, we found three more fragments of the amulet with fusees and another ring with a groove, as the log says the ring is hollow. According to the archaeologists, some of the artifacts are imports from southern Europe. It occurred to me that the bronze spiral found might have been coiled and placed in the groove (photo later). The size of the spirals might suggest this, but it's just my amateur speculation. What would it have been used for then? I never imagined that I could find something so interesting, old and quite unique. So colleagues, don't ask too much and it will come. I've been interested in detecting for many years, I figured I'd buy one when I got big and when that happened they'd ban it. I couldn't do that to you. In the end I didn't buy a detector, but I did get one for my elderly family's anniversary in the spring of 2019. I wish everyone many great finds! Mildes P.S. for Dundee - 2.5 miles from .....

Balsamarium

Traced fragments of the amulet

Some of the books as a gift from the museum.