Branko Barisic, a Croatian detectorist who posts about his discoveries on his Instagram page, Metal Detecting Croatia, including a huge Roman coin depicting Alexander Severus, says location is more important than the fanciness of your metal detector. No matter the ground type, your dig location will be a major factor in what you find. They will know what’s best for your area.” If you don’t have a local hobby shop, this guide will help get you acquainted with the top metal detectors on the market right now, some of which can handle all types of terrain. According to Martin, someone searching for gold jewelry on a saltwater beach should choose a different machine than someone searching for old coins in a park: “My advice is to visit a local hobby shop and have a chat. Ground type: Wherever you plan to search for buried treasure, your metal detector should match that type of ground. Martin says that “spending more than $150 from well-known brands like Garrett, XP, Minelab, and Fisher will save a lot of time and disappointment in the field.” To help you get a quick sense of the cost of each item, we’ve included a dollar-sign ranking for each product below: $ for a metal detector that costs less than $500, $$ for one that costs between $501 and $1,000, and $$$ for a price tag of more $1,000. So while you shouldn’t spend thousands on your first metal detector, you don’t want to go too cheap, either. Price: According to Brad Martin of Green Mountain Metal Detecting, the more expensive the machine, the more it can discriminate between trash and treasure. We asked Reeves, Chambers, Kropiwiec, and five other experienced detectorists from the United States and Europe about the metal detectors they recommend.īest overall | Best for beginners | Best intuitive metal detector | Best all-terrain | Best waterproof | Best for kids | Best large search coil | Best pinpointer And no matter where you’re digging, it’s a good idea to document and photograph where you find things, just in case. So it’s best to do a little research before you go treasure-hunting in your nearby park. When it comes to public land, laws differ from country to country and state to state.
The general rule of thumb for using a metal detector - according to Reeves as well as Emily Chambers, a detectorist living in southwest England, and Artur Kropiwiec, a U.K.-based detectorist - is if you’re not digging on your own land, you need to make sure you have the landowner’s (or the state’s) permission first. If not properly handled and recorded, these sites and the stories of the people who labored there would be lost both to their descendants and to the world. Before ever putting shovel to the ground, they carefully survey the land, looking for evidence of labor sites (usually a concentration of nails). Reeves works with detectorists at Montpelier to recover and preserve the stories of the enslaved Americans who lived and labored on the 2,650-acre plantation.
With that said, there are instances in which the two can cooperate. But he also explains that there is “a tense relationship between metal detectorists and archaeologists” stemming from incidents of theft and destruction of historic sites throughout Europe and the U.S. “There are places that people can metal-detect and kind of scratch that itch to find things,” says Matthew Reeves, director of archaeology at James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia, noting that beaches are a good place to start.
With the right metal detector, a little patience, and some knowledge of history, anyone can dig up centuries-old jewelry and long-lost coins - or at least have a better chance of finding a lost earring in the grass.īefore you go hunting for artifacts, think about where you plan to dig and whether you’d be disturbing a site that should otherwise be preserved. For most of us, the fantasy of finding buried treasure faded away along with other childhood passions, like making it into the Guinness World Records for building the world’s largest pillow fort.
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