What amazes me Tom is that you hit areas (stage stops ) where you don't find tabs , clad , modern trash , etc. So there must be "time period" trash ? Must be some very remote areas. The research must be very tedious to find locations like that. Or sometimes it's easy and you get lucky finding a good spot. Do you ever strike out on sites you do research on ?
Kob, good to hear from you , and great questions :
Yes, these type stage stops, which faded and ceased all-human activity after 1900-ish, are VERY RARE. The typical story is: They gave way to modern farm-houses, or are now under a Kmart parking lot, blah blah.
But yes we have researched and found some that are just faded spots in the boondocks, with nothing modern there. And then yes, the only trash is period-trash (ie.: "fun junk"). Eg.: toe-taps, lantern parts, buttons, rim-fires and pistol balls, etc.... And when you get into sites like that: A perfect penny/dime signal has you "holding your breath", haha And the coins were : reales, and super early seateds. Contrast to if you're hunting urban parks, and get a penny/dime signal, guess what it's going to be ? A modern penny or dime, right ?
I remember finding a virgin adobe site (our west coast version of what east-coasters call "cellar holes"), back in the early 1990s. Just a blemish of barely recognizable landscape scar square outline, in a cow pasture deep in the mountains. And for the next few months, we pulled hundreds of targets out of the site. The "junk" was scores of what we call "green copper". That's the black-smithed green copper snippets. And lots of gilt buttons, etc.... The absolute NEWEST coin to surface, was an 1860s IH. I recall that only on a rare occasion, would a nuisance modern bullet shell be out there. But otherwise, it was as if "time-stood-still" after the 1860s.
Another memorable site was a country picnic site that was used from the 1880s to the mid 1920s. Then ceased all human activity. We pulled about 150 coins from there. And the NEWEST was a mid 1920s merc. Or .... I think there was a nuisance memorial out there, for some reason. But otherwise, every single coin was old. And zero pulltabs, foil, etc... And yes, a $5 gold was among that coin-count