|
|
Dear visitor,
after a brief introduction of myself this page describes the philosophy of this site, why it was created and what sort of content it provides.
My name is Thorsten Straub and I live in Munich, Germany. By profession I am a software engineer though in the last years much of my time and passion was devoted to amateur archaeology. While my main interest in the first 3 decades of my life was in the mathematical-technical field, I was always interested in history, especially in military history. I liked to visit museums, read books and travelled to historical sites and battlefields.
When I visited these places or touched relics my thoughts always wandered back to those who lived there or created and used the items in my hands. This was 500, 1000 or even 2000 years ago. What an amount of time in comparison to a human's life span. These items gave me a feeling of continuity. Previous generations have left a cultural heritage that became part of what we are today in a similar way to biological ancestors.
No matter how many history books I read these previous generations always seemed somewhat pale, as if seen through mist. Was there a more direct way to experience history? A way to get away from a purely theoretic approach to the physical experience of finding and digging relics of local history? Yes, there was.
Today, by using a metal detector and by doing careful book research everyone with enough drive and determination can find historical relics within easy car drive distance around his home. A modern metal detector can find a coin in some 20 cm depth and larger items deeper. That might seem little at first but it allows good discoveries in practice. Such machines are available since the mid to late 1980s and they have been enhanced since then. At presence we are still the first generation to have such machines available at affordable prices. This offers excellent discovery prospects. This web site was set up to share the results with other people interested in private historical discoveries world wide.
There are various types of detector searches. Some like hunting the beach for jewelry, others like to find coins for their collection. The type of hunting advocated on this website tries to find historical places and to verify written historical records which can be true or not. Similar to a crime scene investigator who collects evidence to find out what happened at a place I use walks, detector searches and carefully mapped find distributions to reconstruct past events. Over the years I visited many places and found countless items.
Unlike other sites on metal detecting this is not just a presentation of finds. Of course, finds are presented but my main goal is to give background information, to draw conclusions concerning past events and, last but not least, to describe the joy of discovery. This is why this web site was named that way.
The main sections are descriptions of my searches (main menu item “Search Reports”), presentation of special finds (“Selected Finds”) as well as accounts and comments on topics related to the world of private history discovery (“Miscellaneous”). The section “Visitor’s Corner” was added to help visitors to find interesting content fast.
Though the presented material has some scientific elements the target audience are not only archaeologists but all people who care enough for history to go out and search for its traces. If accounts concentrate too much on facts and avoid any emotion – as many archaeological accounts do - they tend to become dry fact lists. I tried to avoid this by adding find stories, describing the joy of discovery as well as finds. After all, the origin of all science is curiosity – which is an emotion.
If that sounds interesting to you I hope you will enjoy the following pages.
Thorsten Straub, Munich, in Summer 2006
|
