Dug up my own backyard for 3 hours looking for arrowheads and found a 1940s bottle cap instead
I got way too into a YouTube rabbit hole about surface hunting and figured my creek in southern Ohio had to have something. Turned up a rusty bottle cap and half a horseshoe, which my neighbor said means someone kept livestock there back in the day. Anyone know if bottle caps ever mean anything to archaeologists or is it just trash that outlived its owner?
Bottle caps show up at old farm sites all the time but that doesn't make them valuable. Archaeologists mostly use them for dating a site, like if you find a certain brand you know people were there after a certain year, but a single cap in your yard is just litter that got buried. The horseshoe is honestly more interesting since it points to an actual barn or pen somewhere nearby. Three hours for a cap and half a shoe sounds like a rough day though, maybe check the banks after a good rain when stuff washes out.