ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS METAL DETECTOR HOBBYISTS

The story of how Sal Guttuso found his calling sounds like the beginning of an urban legend for nervous parents: He was playing in an abandoned building across the street from his father’s French Quarter restaurant when a van pulled up. The dilapidated structure usually attracted vagrants, so the van presented a tantalizing deviation from the norm, especially when two men armed with curious equipment and big headphones jumped out. Guttuso followed them.

“They didn’t shoo me off,” he says. In fact, one called him over and pointed to a place in the ground that had drawn his interest. As Guttuso watched, the man dug down into the earth until he found what he was looking for. He extracted a circa-1800s silver dollar from the hole, and then two more.

The man had literally dug up treasure right in front of him.

“Now, looking back on that, I have often wondered if that old boy was just playing a trick on me to get me interested, to get me hooked,” says Guttuso. “Regardless, the end result was the same—I had to have a metal detector.” Now 42, metal detecting has been his “exclusive passion, addiction, hobby, whatever you want to call it”.

It’s his career, as well. Guttuso and his wife Ashley run History Hunts, a metal detector tour company for adventurous treasure hunters.

A typical handheld metal detector looks like a stick with a metal donut on the end. The user walks slowly, sweeping (or “swinging”) their detector across the ground, watching an indicator needle, digital display or listening to headphones (or both) which transmit pings, buzzes and beeps back to them when they pass over a metal object. To the uninitiated, it can look like someone trying to vacuum the planet while listening to some tunes.

In recent years, metal detecting has hit a kind of pop cultural sweet spot: The National Geographic Channel produces a reality show called Diggers and the BBC comedy The Detectorists, which follows the exploits of a fictional metal detecting club, has scored critical acclaim. Enthusiasts can indulge in punny t-shirts (“I dig booty”) or groove to 13 songs about metal detecting by Nashville singer Whit Hill (album name: “I Dug It up”.) Even former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman has caught the bug and sells a signature metal detector. (It literally has his signature emblazoned across the front panel.)

Detectors frequently post videos of their hunts and finds on YouTube. This was how Guttuso got noticed; his videos that earned him a following among fellow hunters, who asked him to take them out detecting. It wasn’t long before he sensed an opportunity, left his fulltime job at a big drug company and started History Hunts in 2007. In addition to leading metal detecting tours in near his rural Virginia home, he has taken groups shipwreck detecting in Florida, gold prospecting in Nevada and relic and coin-hunting all over the southern U.S. He also leads international trips to Essex County, England.

Guttuso works with private property owners to organize his hunts and enforces local law. In England, hunters are required to report potentially significant finds, and the British Museum has the first right of refusal. That John the Baptist statue that one of Guttuso’s clients found? It never left home; the museum snapped it up and reimbursed the finder. Guttuso and his patrons also sometimes donate finds to local museums.

You have to love the hunt itself because the score can be elusive. Guttuso related a story of a particularly fruitful hunt near a former hospital site where his group uncovered four Civil War belt buckles in rapid succession. Suddenly, Guttuso also got a signal on his detector that sounded just like those that had heralded the first four finds.

“I’m videotaping, I’m so excited,” he says. “And you know what? At a foot down, it was a flattened out Vienna sausage can. So that’s just the way it goes.”

To read the complete article, see:
The Obsessive Treasure Hunters Who Travel the World with Metal Detectors (www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-people-who-travel-the-world-with-metal-detectors)

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