Several arrowheads and pottery shards from Mogollon or other indian peoples.
One Clovis point.
Fossils. Lots of fossils.
Almost owned:
2nd edition Gutenberg bible. Given up without a second thought by my Grandfather to his sister, along with almost everything else of value, at the dispensation of his mother’s estate.
200+ acres of land in Central Texas in continuous ownership of my lineal family from an original Empresario grant c.1845. Originally totally more than 2000. I’ll have to try and buy it all back, someday.
Forgot about this: I have a handful of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and half-dollars from the 1910’s and 1920’s. My grandmother collected coins, and I think a 1918 penny is the oldest of them. She left them to me when she died last year.
The oldest thing i own is my Dad’s old acoustic guitar, he gave it to me when I was six, and I am ashamed to say I still suck real hard at playing, hopefully I can convince myself to keep practicing.
I have a shirt that I have worn since junior high school, 17ish years ago. It’s light blue with no logos, it’s pretty huge, and it has seven or eight little holes in it. Crazy comfortable, I wear it around the house once in awhile.
Until a couple of years ago, I owned an antique xylophone that dated back to the 1920s, but I sold it to some german dude on Ebay.
My apartment was built in 1514. I also used to have a collection of Roman toy soldiers - as in toy soldiers that Romans would have played with. Mostly they were from around 100BC (roughly the time of the Marian Reforms for those of you paying attention) but I had a few later ones that were probably of Dalmatian or Moesian origin. I sold them to a collector when I moved to Paris but I’m thinking about starting a new collection.
I also have some re-enactment gear in storage that includes actual 14th century armour plates on the cuisses.
I have my great-great-grandmother’s coffee mill from the late 1800s, a kitchen table over 100 years old from another branch, and an umbrella stand from last century.
And I just bought a Gustav Stickley chair today, which would be right at 100 years old.
Trilobite fossils, collected at Mt. Cadiz, near Amboy, California. Cambrian to Devonian (I think these were more towards the Cambrian end of things, but it’s been a while since I was out there for a sedimentary course). 500,000 million years old or so.
I remember a couple wandering by and asking me where the trilobite fossils were. They were standing on them. Thousands and thousands of them.
Oh hey, for those that like going out to absolute desolateness, how to get there (no world wide web back then for me):
I don’t know specifically about England, but I think most countries with actual valuable ancient history has rules like these - most places guarantee you a finders fee, but you’re not allowed to just loot ancient ruins because you feel like it. Should you stumble upon something valuable next time you visit the Pyramids, you won’t get to keep it either.
Is this another of your nanny state screeds?
And yes, even if she found the stuff on her own land, the laws (here it’s called Danefæ which is national treasures) overules property laws - you’re always ensured a finders fee depending on value, but you don’t get to keep it or set your own price. The reason being that the item has historical value and belongs to everybody - it’s not a trinket to be sold off to some foreign collector (yes, Indiana Jones was a looter and grave robber).
On that note I completely forgot that I own some Stone Age arrowheads and a single axehead, that my father found when he worked for a museum (these are common enough not to be considered Danefæ). Probably only 4.000 - 7.000 years old.
Heh. I don’t have much old stuff but I do have a few old books: a 1920 print of the original 1919 edition of Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes (in two volumes), and an 1896 print of F.A. Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus.
Yeah, countries freak out when you try to take artifacts from them. Which is actually kind of a shame because we throw out SO MUCH INTERESTING SHIT at dig sites. Just because you can’t store every single piece of pottery or every interesting rock. I mean, I get that you shouldn’t be carting sculptures off, but seriously in Israel the ground is LITTERED with pieces of pottery. Not even decorated. Just broken little pieces everywhere that you will get yelled at for taking. You have to get special permission to remove stuff or risk having them pull your permits. Egypt is especially strict about it, as it Israel.
Once when I was a young child, my mother let me push the emptied shopping cart back to the rack. While I was there, I found a shiny big coin on the ground, so obviously I took it.
That coin turned out to be a 1901 silver dollar from the New Orleans mint. I still have it to this day, sitting in a cup with odd coinage from Prague and England and Mexico.
