Guy at the Denver museum lab night showed me a 400 year old coin under the scope and I still think about it

Henry Palmer · 2026-09-20T06:10:03.583667+00:00

I went to a museum lab night in Denver about 7 months ago with my sister, mostly just to get out of the house. There was a volunteer named Walt, maybe 70 years old, sitting at a table with a little microscope and a tray of coins from a shipwreck off the coast of Florida. He waved me over and let me look through the eyepiece at a silver piece of eight, and I could see these tiny scratch marks around the edge where someone bit it back in the 1600s to check if it was real silver. He said the marks are one of the few places you can almost see a person from that long ago doing something normal, like you could picture them standing on a dock with it in their teeth. I asked him how many of these he had looked at and he just laughed and said enough that he stopped counting in 1998. That one moment did more for me than any documentary, and now I want to find a local archaeology group that does lab work like that. Does anyone here know how a regular person with zero training gets involved in sorting or cataloging finds? I would honestly scrub dirt off pottery shards for free just to be in the room.

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Guy at the Denver museum lab night showed me a 400 year old coin under the scope and I still think about it | Archaeology Discoveries - HW Forums