green white-heart and red green-heart Hudson’s Bay Company trade beads. tiny, with a heavy history. on a handmade pin. copper alloy gleaming from the Thames mud. leaning on a non-native oyster shell. imported for food since Roman times. washing up on the tide ever since. and some massive garnets, relatively speaking. possibly brought into the Thames for industrial purposes. for use in polishing perhaps. they’re naturally faceted and very hard. other garnet theories are available. #mudlarking

pretty sure I found my first piece of Thames gold today. the gleam of it, like nothing else. possibly a spangle, a Tudor sequin. a seen dangling from Catherine Parr’s hat feathers in this late 16th-century painting in the National Portrait gallery. #mudlarking

The beach (mercurial) is mostly tiny stones right now, so, I did a tiny beach hunt.

See: yellow-ware, flow-blue, mid-1800’s transferprint earthenware, quartzite and chert debitage (scraps from tool making)

#mudlarking #beachcombing #flintknapping

New beach trash feat. A FACE (and some weird brick)

#flatlay #mudlarking #beachcombing

4. Beach trash July 13th, feat. glass with a PEANUT pattern!! 🥜

#mudlarking #beachcombing #vermont

I will never not get excited about finding a bead. even a super simple bead. and garnets. that is all. #mudlarking

RT J. R. Carpenter
glorious lark in heavy rain showers in London this morning. found a complete Roman bone gaming counter dating from AD 50-410. board games were commonplace in Roman Britain, though the rules of some of these games are still little understood #mudlarking

Roman pottery, made in Britain. Nene valley colour-coated ware, aka slip ware, aka Castor ware, produced in and widely distributed across Britain 2nd to 4th centuries AD. this is the largest piece I’ve ever found in the Thames. I’m hoping it’s from a Castor Box. #mudlarking

glorious lark in heavy rain showers in London this morning. found a complete Roman bone gaming counter dating from AD 50-410. board games were commonplace in Roman Britain, though the rules of some of these games are still little understood. board games were often played at the baths. there were a number baths in Roman London near the site of this find. #mudlarking

Bah this fake Sunday feeling is all very well but I’ve already watched my usual #mudlarking and #restoration in the #dolomitemountains videos this week, and the #azerbaijan farm life. What’s everyone else watching on the #YouTube?

I hear it's #introduction time!

I'm a professional #artist in my 40's who just moved to the Netherlands from California. I'm #ActuallyAutistic & 10 years #sober. My special interests are #Craft history, #ArtHistory, #ghostsigns , #atomic ephemera, #mudlarking, & snails. I collect cats & tattoos & old advertising signs. In a past life I worked in tech marketing. FUN FACT! I own the only 12 ft skeleton in North Holland.

Looking to meet artists, nerds, & people in the Netherlands!

a couple of months ago I found a piece of Galena on the Thames foreshore, in an area where we also find lots of lead waste drippings, presumably from making lead cloth seals, which we also find lots of. Galena is the natural mineral form of lead sulphide, PbS, the most important ore of lead. has a melting point low enough to be smelted over wood fire. it’s not local to London. I wonder if this piece was destined for a cloth seal but missed the crucible a few hundred years ago. #mudlarking

three glass beads found on the Thames foreshore recently. the blue one *might* be Roman. the green one *might* have been imported from Venice by the Hudson’s Bay Company for trade with Indigenous People on great turtle island, for beaver pelts and other furs. #mudlarking often involves speculation. I don’t mind not being able to prove the exact dates of some finds. sometimes just finding the proverbial needle in the haystack is enough.

this scrap of lead found on the Thames foreshore is a slightly squashed cross and pellets token. small currency was scarce in the 17th-century. leads tokens were struck and circulated locally, exchanged for goods and services. a pint of ale, a pot of tea. #mudlarking

RT @jr_carpenter :
ever see holes in a seashell and wonder how they got there? yesterday on the Thames foreshore I found fossil of holes and interconnecting tunnels bored into a shell by a sponge (Entobia cretacea). preserved in flint before the shell eroded 60-95 million years ago #mudlarking

ever find an old oyster shell riddled with holes and wonder how they got there? they were probably made by Entobia cretacea, a boring sponge. (a sponge that bores holes, rather than a sponge that’s inherently boring). on the Thames foreshore today I found a trace fossil of a 60-95 million year old Entobia cretacea, a cast of the galleries and interconnecting tunnels that the sponge bored into the shell. these absences were preserved in a flint nodule before the shell eroded. #mudlarking

RT @jr_carpenter :
opalescent morning. as seen from the railing. of London Bridge. and below. a mother of pearl button. popped off a waistcoat. 250 years ago. or so. #mudlarking

opalescent morning. as seen from the railing. of London Bridge. and below. a mother of pearl button. popped off a waistcoat. 250 years ago. or so. #mudlarking

an approx. 450-year-old lead alnage seal, found on the Thames foreshore recently. Tudor, possibly Elizabethan. from the Crown-over-Portcullis series of county seals, possibly from Kingston. alnage, akin to yardage, was a system for monitoring the quality of saleable cloth, in effect in England from 1196. for more info on Crown-over-Portcullis and other alnage seals, see: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1349956/4/488665%20full.pdf #mudlarking

teeny tiny green glass bead found on the Thames foreshore at the very end of a lark last week. a venetian white heart trade bead, I think. possibly Hudson’s Bay Company. #mudlarking