Unearthing history
Responsible metal detecting can reveal forgotten stories and preserve them for the future.
On a warm summer day in rural Boyle County, Scott Clark swings the coil of his XP Deus metal detector over patches of bare earth alongside a dirt tractor path. He covers the ground methodically, following a rough grid laid out in his head.
It’s his first time detecting this patch, which had been overgrown with brambles—but it’s not a shot in the dark. Previous outings in an adjacent grove yielded Civil War-era pistol bullets, rifle strap fittings and cavalry buttons.
As the detector warbles and chirps, Clark translates what he hears: a choppy tone signals rusted fence wire; a low hum indicates moisture in the roots of plants. Holding his shovel behind his back to prevent interference, he runs the detector at maximum sensitivity, looking for signals up to 9 inches deep. There’s another chirp—a high tone, this time. “I’m going to investigate this one,” he says.
He sinks the shovel into the soil and drops to one knee, smoothly lifting a plug of dirt and prodding the hole with a handheld device called a pinpointer. “We have a Minie ball,” he says. It’s an unfired lead bullet, and Clark is the first person to see it since it was dropped by a Civil War soldier.
Lexington metal detectorist Scott Clark searches for Civil War artifacts on a farm near Perryville.
The find is exhilarating, but the most important part is what comes next: Clark logs the precise location using a handheld GPS with meter-level accuracy. Next, he takes a photo of the Minie ball, with a small ruler for scale, and marks a clear plastic bag with a unique site ID corresponding to the location data. Only then does he remove the artifact. Without the data, which Clark adds to a database and shares with the University of Kentucky, the bullet would be just one more piece of lead in a glass case, he says. But with the data, it’s part of a story—one that’s designed to outlive him.
One of the most important aspects of the metal detecting hobby, experts say, is documentation. Good record-keeping can preserve artifacts’ stories for the future. Failure to do so, however, buries them for good.
Responsible metal detecting
Nicole Konkol, site protection program administrator at the Kentucky Heritage Council, says professional archaeologists understand the draw of metal detecting, and they can be resources for hobbyists.
“Doing this kind of thing is cool,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons we’re archaeologists. We’re your friends; we are not your foes. Reach out to us. We would love to help you.”
Responsible detecting begins with following the law. Nearly all public land is off-limits to detectorists in Kentucky, with some case-by-case exceptions for city and county properties. Digging on state property, including state parks, is illegal. In some cases, including on military sites, burial sites and federal lands, unauthorized digging is a felony. Most detectorists search on private land, which requires explicit permission from the landowner—preferably in writing—including agreements about what items, if any, the detectorist is allowed to keep.
Clark lays a scale card next to an Enfield rifle bullet.
When it comes to documentation, Konkol’s rule is simple: capture as much information as you can, beginning with location. She recommends hobbyists use GPS devices that are accurate to the sub-meter level (apps like Google Maps are not precise enough). Take photographs, using a ruler or other reference for scale, and use written notes or voice memos to capture additional information as needed.
Capturing data is only part of the puzzle, however. Konkol says metal detecting should culminate in sharing results. Detectorists are notoriously tight-lipped about the locations of their finds—an attitude that helps prevent trespassing and looting, while shielding hard-won permissions from competitors. But communicating with trusted sources, like professional archaeologists, local museums and historical societies, is essential for preserving knowledge.
“Sharing the information makes all the difference,” Konkol says. “If somebody is out there metal detecting on their private property and they find a historic site they care about, reach out to us. We can provide you with a site form. We would love to have your data, just so that the entities that will be here, hopefully in perpetuity, can have that data to share with folks in the future.”
Historical knowledge shouldn’t be limited to a shoebox in the closet, in other words. When knowledge is captured and shared, it can take on a life of its own.
Context is the key
“Context is the key,” says David Pollack, who directs the Kentucky Archaeological Survey. He compares archaeological context with the forensic clues of a crime scene. An object’s spatial information can sometimes tell archaeologists as much, or more, than the object itself. Unfortunately, many collectors commit those details only to memory.
“I talked to a collector one time, and I watched an artifact move between sites as we chatted, because they had no record of it,” Pollack says. “They just have a collection, so without that context, it loses much of its information.”
Clark, a Lexington-based digital marketing consultant, applies obsessive professionalism and archaeological training to his metal detecting hobby. He estimates he’s made more than 300 trips to the Boyle County property, which is privately owned, and he’s documented more than 2,000 Civil War finds, all of which are catalogued and housed in the William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky.
Clark is reflected in a computer screen that displays mapped markers of Civil War artifacts he has documented over the years.
Most detectorists don’t want to burn daylight hours on data, Clark says, but that’s where he spends about half of his time. On at least one occasion, he’s driven back to a site to capture a location he forgot to log.
When you look at his data plotted on a digital map, you begin to understand why it’s so important. Zoomed in, each artifact appears isolated: a lead ball here, a scabbard tip there. But when you zoom out, clusters and patterns appear, showing concentrations of activity in the aftermath of battle.
Clark documents the precise location of a Minie ball he found, placing it in a labeled bag.
Brian Bush, the park manager at the nearby Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site, says Clark discovered buttons on private property that proved, for the first time, the location of a Texas unit during the Battle of Perryville. Clark has also identified camps previously unknown to historians. One of the first clues is often a lump of melted lead. The theory, Clark says, is that bored soldiers sat around the fire, throwing deformed bullets into the blaze.
“I think that I’m playing a part in remembering those people,” Clark says, standing in the shade of a barn during a break. “There’s a few diaries from soldiers, a few letters home, and you can assemble all that together—pieces. But where that bullet is lying on the ground, there’s no ambiguity. It was pulled out of a rifle right there.”
History of the hobby
Metal detecting technology long predates the hobby. Alexander Graham Bell created one of the first metal detectors in 1881 to aid doctors as they searched for a bullet that lodged in President James Garfield’s chest after an assassin shot him in the back.
The machine was an induction balance device originally intended for Bell’s previous invention, patented in 1876—the telephone. His metal detecting machine worked on test subjects, but ultimately failed to locate the bullet or save the president, who survived for nearly three agonizing months before dying of an infection.
Metal detecting first emerged as a hobby in the 1960s, when manufacturers created consumer models based on World War II mine-clearing technology. In the decades since, increasingly user-friendly tools and the age-old lure of buried secrets have established metal detecting as a common pastime.
Helpful links
Want to learn more about metal detecting? Let’s dig in.
- Visit Scott Clark’s website, detecting.us, for articles, how-to guides, artifact identification tips, frequently asked questions and more: https://detecting.us/.
- How to choose a metal detector: https://detecting.us/whichdetector
- Nicole Konkol, site protection program administrator at the Kentucky Heritage Council, welcomes questions from metal detectorists about how to document their finds. She can be reached at nicole.konkol@ky.gov.
- LOCATE, a program at James Madison’s Montpelier, teaches participants how to use archaeological research principles while metal detecting. https://www.montpelier.org/visit/locate-metal-detector-expedition/
