After the success of finding my first Roman gold coin with the SDC 2300, I decided to take it in my hand luggage to Croatia.
The trip was hastily organised when we received news that a field had been harvested, where Richard Lincoln and I had found 55 hammered coins in November 2013 (picture below). The Croatian archaeologists wanted us to identify the area of the hoard, so the race was on to do this before the farmer sowed his crop.
My trip in and out of Croatia was uneventful, apparently boarder control luggage scanners regularly see Minelab landmine-detectors traveling in hand luggage, and it was even assumed at one point we were humanitarian deminers working to remove landmines laid during Serbia/Croatia war.
On arriving on the field my heart sunk, the field hadn't been ploughed and was covered in long wheat stubble. This was a disaster as the area had been picked clean using three top machines including a GPX 5000. We were counting on the soil being turned to bring more coins to the surface, and then we could find the hot spot.
By now a team of archaeologists had arrived followed by the farmer. We all agreed conditions were impossible and they left, leaving two of the archaeologist team to record anything we could find. We started using CTX 3030 and after an hour we'd found three of the small hammered silver coins.
So getting bored I took the SDC 2300 from its travel bag, and took it to the areas where the coins were found. Beside one of the recently dug holes I got a clear signal, and digging down eight inches I recovered coin four. This was very deep for such a small coin, and this discovery impressed one of the Archaeologists enough to ask if he could have a go.
He then dug another 18 coins from close to the last hole, one coin after another. These were all deep and not detectable by the other machines we had with us... In short the SDC 2300 was finding coins other top detectors couldn't detect.
The SDC 2300 as an archaeological tool was fantastic. It's immunity to the affects of mineralisation, which are common to Croatian archaeological sites, gives this detector extra ground penetration. This combined with its extreme sensitivity has made it my preferred tool for hammered coin hoard hunting. Iron is still a problem though. I dug a lot of it while testing, so the amount of iron in the soil of a site will ultimately determine if the SDC 2300 can be used effectively in all locations.
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