I randomly found an anvil on sale for cheap and now our family has the blacksmithing bug. One of our favorite things to do is take a couple anvils and a small forge down to the park and let the kids smash red hot nails into "mini-swords". We have also started selling the swords on his lemonade cart, People actually buy them!<p>You would think this would be a dangerous activity but it turns out to be petty tame. About 1/20 kids burns a finger, and when they finish yelling they inevitably tough up and get back to work because they are having so much fun.<p>So anyway, scrounge up plumbing torch and some nails and let the kids make "mini-swords." You can use a sledge hammer or any big chunk of metal as your anvil.<p>If you want to see what the "swords" look like my kid has pictures on his site: <a href="https://lemonsword.com/" rel="nofollow">https://lemonsword.com/</a>
In another era this would have been a kingly fortune. That's one risk of buried treasure: not all treasure will keep its value well. You might find a pile of gold coins, or maybe it'll be aluminum spoons (once highly valuable), cowrie shells, or iron nails.
tl;dr The article examines some context around a 5 ton hoard of ancient roman nails discovered during 1959, at Inchtuthil (near Dunkeld in Scotland). The romans built a fort and stockpiled these nails (and other materials) at Inchtuthil. However, they needed to abandon the fort and opted to bury a cache of nails six feet below ground, rather than cart them away or leave them in place. This prevented the locals from impounding the nails and melting them into other weapons against the romans. The quantity of nails indicates the scope of materials needed to construct a fort, as well as the blacksmithing quality available at the time.<p>If this interests you, I recommend Bret Devereaux's five part series about medieval iron production and use, <a href="https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-hammer-time/" rel="nofollow">https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-...</a>
It came as some surprise that <i>Inchtuthil</i> was not a Nahuatl place name.<p>That did resolve my confusion, with nails not AFAIK being used by the Aztecs.