Always searching for the unusual

George Wyant makes his living digging small holes, with the anticipation of finding a remarkable coin or artifact.
Wyant told Iola Rotarians about his role on “Diggers,” a National Geographic reality show, Thursday.
Traveling the country with a metal detector and spade, Wyant and his partner, Tim Saylor, search sites that have historic significance. What they find frequently ends up in a museum, though when they dig on private property the owner has first dibs.
Wyant is an Iolan by virtue of his wife, nee Lori Rouse, who graduated from Iola High in 1988. Her mother and stepfather, Hazel and Don Jones, live east of town. They met and married when she was visiting in Montana.
Before circumstances and fascination with metal detecting changed his life, Wyant worked mining copper in Montana.
After purchasing a metal detector, he quickly learned that fortune didn’t await at every site, but thrill of the chase did. So enamored, Wyant and Saylor began making DVDs of their searches which caught the attention of a television company in Bethesda, Md.
“The videos were pitched to the networks and National Geographic liked what they saw,” he said.
The digging team recently finished shooting their fourth season of 16 episodes, including one in Georgia where they looked for relics from Union Gen. Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War.
The twosome have found remains from colonial period sites, as well as those created by the Civil War and even a plethora of things left or lost at a World War II camp.
While some in the scientific community are distressed by metal detector advocates searching historically significant sites, Wyant said his and Saylor’s finds are marked and catalogued by an archaeologist, often using GPS, to ensure they add to the knowledge base.
Among sites they have visited were a couple of private properties in Humboldt in an episode about violent political confrontations between anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery Border Ruffians that took place in eastern Kansas and western Missouri in the runup to the Civil War.
One of the most exciting find, Wyant said, was a small coin he unearthed at a colonial site in Maine. Eventually it was identified as a 1600s coin from the Middle East that undoubtedly came on a slave ship to the United States. “It was the only one that has been found in the U.S.,” he said.
Another exceptional discovery were pewter musket balls at a Colonial site in Pennsylvania. The defenders of a small fort had exhausted lead balls and melted and formed pewter, a brittle material, into balls to fire at attacking Indians.
“The third hole I dug had two of the pewter balls in it,” Wyant said, a shocking outcome for a trailing archaeologist.
He and Saylor do what they do to “find things so people can enjoy them,” he added. But, he allowed, not every hole or even every site search turns up something of significance.
“You don’t see the hundreds and hundreds of holes we dig and find nothing” on the TV show, Wyant mused.