Dating an Historic Site

We're not archaeologists or scientists or anything like that, but we're curious as heck. One thing we constantly ask ourselves is, "When are we going to eat?

The other thing we constantly ask ourselves is, "How old is this place?"

The process is fairly simple, and then again, not. You look for man-made stuff. You find man-made stuff. You determine when the stuff was made. The oldest stuff you find should indicate the age of the site.

For instance, you find a 1968 quarter and a 1910 quarter. You can pretty much bet that the site dates at least from the beginning of the twentieth century. It could be older, of course, since that 1910 quarter could have been old when it was lost. And, some contemporary explorer could have brought his 1910 coin collection with him yesterday and lost it. But it's a safe assumption that the site is at least as old as the artifact.

Now, your chances of finding things with dates stamped on them are sparse, so you have to do a little detective work.

Look around you. Are there cans? What kind of cans are they? Certain cans were manufactured at different times. Did they use plywood? Plywood wasn't commercially available in the middle of the 1800's, so you know what you're looking at came after that. Welds? Concrete? Same thing.

To help confuse the issue, many sites were worked over periods of time, abandoned, revived, abandoned, and revived, only to be abandoned again. Nevada has had many boom/bust periods and as mineral prices went, so went mining. So you may have a site like, say, Aurora, that was active in the 1860s' again in the 1920's, and again even recently. All that time, miners and prospectors were scurrying about, leaving clues and artifacts for you to find.

Below is a small list of when certain things came into general use, which should help you date what you're looking at.