Reading the Dirt: Dating and Identifying What You Find at Old Homesteads — A Field Guide for Metal Detecting, Bottle Digging, and Relic Hunting (Field Evidence Guides)

Most of what you find at an old homestead is trash. That is exactly why it is worth something.
A gold coin tells you a gold coin was here. It could have been dropped in 1888 or the summer before last. But a rusted can with a soldered side seam and a small hole in its lid tells you something narrow and defensible: a person opened that can and ate what was inside it before about 1910. Nobody made that can afterward. It is a clock, and it has been running in the dirt for a century.

This book teaches you to read it.

Not where to dig. Not what anything is worth. When it was made — and what that lets you say about the people who left it behind.

Manufacturing changed on a schedule across the hundred years between 1850 and 1950, in public, under patent, and every change left a mark on the object that nobody could avoid or fake. Learn the marks and an ordinary scatter of rusted junk becomes a dated occupation: when a family arrived, how long they lasted, what they ate and wore and worked with, and the year the world changed underneath them.

Inside
The single observation that dates a building — square shank or round
Where the mold seam stops climbing, and what it means
How the top of a can dates the twentieth century better than anything else
Reading a headstamp, a backstamp, a patent number, a barbed wire pattern
Why a jar embossed 1858 was probably made in 1910
The six zones of a homestead, and why mixing them destroys the evidence
Where the law actually sits — and why the best-preserved sites are the ones you may not touch
A complete worked site read, start to finish, junk to conclusion
Finding the family's name in free public records
Cleaning, and the things that ruin a find permanently

Nineteen chapters. Eighteen field diagrams. No price guide, no site locations, no false precision.

For metal detectorists, bottle diggers, dump diggers, ghost town walkers, old-house owners, and anyone who has picked something out of the ground and wondered how old it was.