Focus on UK Metal Detecting: More on the rate of 'Keepers' to 'Binned'

JamieB admits he collects mainly the hammered coins among the things he finds, the rest he treats as 'scrap' Jamie:

"I have found 35 hammered in 18 months which is one every two weeks which isn't bad"

Elsewhere he writes: "I've never counted how many targets I dig in a session but if I find one hammy per session and I've dug 100 targets I'm fairly happy". So 99% of the holes he digs, and 99% of the metal items he digs up are not of interest to him, because they do not produced the hammered coins he collects.  Fusion writes: I recall Moderator Dave2468 saying he was happy to get one 'keeper' per session, which sounds like the sort of rate I was indicating: 0 to 2 keepers per 30 - 60 targets. JamieB (Mon Aug 25, 2014 5:01 pm) replies:

I'm lucky that I normally can get out once a week and have access to some good permissions .. Actually, I hate to think how many holes I've dug and that includes just taking the top few inches off .. When I show people my coin collection they have no idea how many holes I've dug to find that lot .. It's probably well over 5000 eek ..

But of course archaeological evidence on the sites he searches does not consist of coins alone.The point here is always that the artefacts we see on sale by dealers or collected by collectors represents many, many more holes in the archaeological record. Here we see multiples of 60 times, a hundred times more being quoted by the people actually doing the artefact hunting. One coin on V-coins could represent sixty or more trashed bits of the archaeological record.