Florida has many that are called shell
mounds. Ancient and old Indian tribes would eat a lot of shelled creatures
since they were close to the ocean and had access. They would collect their
shells and other bones from animals they hunted and would pile it up. Today, a
lot of these mounds are still around and mostly preserved. A lot have been torn
down and the shells used for roads or paths but looking around, few remain
today. Within the mounds are not only shells and bones, but trash from these
ancient tribes such as broken spear points or other items that held no use.
Even though the Indians were resourceful, once the point on an arrowhead broke
in half, the piece was no longer of any use and was trashed and sit in the
mound for thousands of years or more so now, scattered amongst the roads that
used these ancient shell mounds.
Arizona and Western States had many ghost
towns and with ghost towns came trash heaps. Railroads also had their own
dumps. Having been to a few trails in Florida where the railroad once went
through the areas now overran by hanging moss, if you look close enough you
sometimes see shards of glass or metal. Most of these are from lazy and obnoxious
hikers or hunters who litter and ruin the environment. Sometimes though, there
are piles left from the railroad. Back before regulations, the railroads would
dump their trash in a certain location and piles. The glass would shatter as
trash was thrown from the train in these piles and the glass crumbles more each
year. The same goes for other areas in the United States where railroads threw
trash in collected piles.
One day I hiked an old, torn up railroad
in Southwestern Arizona to journey for a day in the desolate desert, not seeing
a single person. Often times I wandered off the railroad to find any remnants
of past life and a few times ran into trash heaps off the side of the railroad.
Most everything was broken as they lied for years and decades in the hot, desert
sun but walking around, many random items can be found such as a 1960s
Huckleberry Hound toy.
It’s not only large trash piles scattered
scarcely throughout but often there were houses spread in the areas where
people had once lived. They would often, especially in times of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, throw trash outside their homes or shacks.
Wandering in certain areas you can notice so many and by what trash you see,
you can estimate how old the area was or when people had lived there. In one
such area where I found a round bottom bottle, that item told me the area was
inhabited in the 1870s and 80s at minimum. Another area that I figured was
quite old by walking around through the trees, miles away from any road and
yes, actually lost if it wasn’t for the mountain I saw and knew how to get
back, I saw an old leather sole of a boot. Those are common since they don’t
break down very fast but this one looked peculiar. Then, I found the usual
button…being so small, buttons are often found. In this same area that had a
lot of older artifacts was this rare bottle, no more than two inches high.
Surprisingly intact and well preserved, one of my favorite pieces is this circa
1880s opium bottle (pictured below). With mandarin writing on the bottle, these
were popular in the Chinese opium dens and areas throughout the old west.
Remember though and be wary that some
areas don’t allow collecting of anything found on the land – especially private
land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and others. Now, unless it was a
gold nugget or coin, to me that to me might be fair game. Still waiting for
that, though.
