January 24, 2026 Glass, Ceramics, and Sherds. First, a bit of housecleaning: Welcome back to Metalman9.ca and Happy New Year! It’s 2026. My apologies, I’ve been delinquent. My last post was, October 25, 2025 - Keystone Detectorists Club Meeting. I like to post something every month, even in winter. My excuse for not posting in November 2025 is that my wife and I were holidaying in Vietnam for most of that month. Then December rolled around and we had a bunch of Christmas stuff to catch up on. December really just sneaked up on us. And then the big day itself and the first thing you know, the month is over and you guessed it… no post. I’ll chalk it up to taking a break. Truth is, we were just ridiculously busy in December. So much for the “Quiet retirement” myth. Now, I’d left a yellow sticky note to myself this summer, stuck on my cork board. Glass, ceramics and sherds is what it says! So glass, ceramics and sherds is what it’s going to be. The pictures are probably more interesting than the write up but hey, context is important too. Like most people, I am drawn to colorful shiny things. As a child, I remember walking these very same farm fields and picking up colored glass. Sometimes one gets lucky and you find a piece of ceramic or porcelain with color markings on it too. Plus, ceramic sherds and shards sometimes have patterns on them that can be identified to a time period or to a maker. Look at the small red piece. It’s not much bigger than a button. I initially thought it was a piece of modern plastic and I almost didn’t pick it up but I do pick up junk too, just to help clean up nature and I don’t want to be distracted by the same piece again while out on a future hunt. It turned out to be a very ornate piece of glass. I now hope to find its companion pieces. They shouldn’t be hard to spot. The glowing green bottle bottom next to a salt shaker is Uranium glass. Yes, uranium was actually used in glass manufacturing and was very popular up to the 1930’s and beyond. It gives glass a distinctive green or yellow color and it lights right up under ultraviolet light. When I’m out metal detecting, I have a habit of picking up all of the glass and ceramics that I see. I have cleaned them all and by rogue, stored them in large 5 liter glass jars. One big jar became another then another… I have also displayed some of the more interesting pieces, especially ceramics that show writing in various display cases like Ryker boxes. (See: reference, however please note that I am not promoting one company over another.) Glass and ceramics add to the story of the finds. I don’t quite know what I’m eventually going to do with them all but they’re my babies for now. I found them, I cleaned them, and I like to think that I’m preserving history for future enthusiasts. Now a point of distinction: Sherds vs Shards. My good friends Sid and Pam, the archeologists, brought this to my attention from my previous posts. Both terms refer to “Broken Pieces”. Sherd is short for potsherd and is a term favored by archeologists for broken pottery found in an archeological dig. Shard however can refer to many different broken materials like glass, metal, and even rocks. Think of broken mirror shards. Sherds and shards often have sharp edges and the term shard does include modern broken ceramic pieces and the like. I have over time gotten much better at spotting actual sherds. Yes, the really old artifacts used by the indigenous people of long ago. I hope to find more glass, ceramics and sherds while out on metal detecting outings coming up this spring and summer. I’m certain that I will. Roger Reference: h t t p s : / / w w w . a m a z o n . c o m / s t o r e s / S o u t h e r n S t a r D i s p l a y s / p a g e / 7 5526D06-6F3E-4129-9FB2-4E0E35AB7392 https://www.jstor.org/stable/275769 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_glass