Earlier this month I had an opportunity to head down to South Carolina (Orangeburg area) with some friends for a long weekend of "treasure hunting". We attended the "Relicon" hunt that was organized by Axel Macon and Clyde "Kandi Chilson" on a 1000 acre piece of property with supposedly a Civil war skirmish. Its sad to say they hyped up the event way too too much , it was a $200 for a three day hunt and it was a big let down . I and many others spent the whole first day in the 2 fields available , they lost permission to the large oval fields marked on the map
(or should i say never had permission to it in the first place ) the night before the event with little to nothing to show for it. Supposedly they had been planning this event out for the last year but neglected to provide any restrooms for the hundreds of people who shown up , this event was very poorly run and the hosts didn't really seem to care or help people locating any finds. This is not the first time that I've heard Axel and Clyde do this type of shenanigans unfortunately it was long after the hunt though. My only find were some very small lead buck shot , shotgun shells and miscellaneous brass scrap or tubing . I did recover a small pistol type bullet that was id'ed as a .36 colt pistol but that was wrong .
There was some glimmer of hope that took place after the first day , many people complained at the lack of finds and huntable land as most of the 1000 acres was swamp near the Edisto river so the organizers got the neighboring field permission but it was not a huge strip of land with a very newer home built on it but it was something. Late our first day one of the friends I was with bumped into a gentleman and 10 year old daughter digging for native American artifacts , he invited us to dig with him and that he would never be able to dig it all in the next day or two so we gladly accepted . This good man was Chad Childs and well known for finding and excavating ancient artifacts from all around the south , it was great to meet him in person and "Pick his brain" so to speak , the man is a wealth of knowledge of native American items .
We shown up early at the site 6:30 the next day and went right to work , we had brought down with us a full sized sifter , water detecting sifters and shovels to do some fossil hunting later in the weekend down here too so these worked pretty well for finding arrow points and pottery, the nice 3 legged sifter worked flawlessly but I had to wear gloves as I found out the hard way that the tiny knapped flakes of chert were still razor sharp after thousands of years in the dirt.
. My first day i claimed first point
a small arrow "bird point" , if i wasn't sifting i'm sure i would of missed it . A few of the friends I was with (in the pictures) found broken points or bases but Ron got a beautiful point (here it is
) its more than twice the length of mine and had a nice semi-translucent appearance held to the light . We dug most of that Saturday and went back Sunday again early but only until noonish my stone, flakes , tools ( the grinding stone near the antler ),points and pottery from both those days
the deer shed was eyeballed detecting through the woods (i got 2 that day)
. here is the small point and an unfinished larger point
. Mr. Childs saved our hunt at the Relicon as he was unselfishly gave us his time about where to look and information and timelines about our finds , he was a great host who helped many others who came down to dig.
our last day Sunday we finally got into the river to find prehistoric shark teeth and fossils , our backs were pretty worn out because of the digging and sifting the last day and a half but we all want some shark teeth and particularly a Megladon tooth.needless to say after a couple of hours I had about 200 teeth and a broken meg tooth plus some good others .
So we did have a backup plan to fossil hunt if the detecting hunt was a bust , sorry for not showing any detecting finds . I mainly posted for all to be aware of any future "Relicon" hunts or any hunts that involve Axel and Clyde , these two have set a bad precedence to misguide and false advertise their events just to profit off others.
Dan
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