Known to the internet as “Dig it Dan,” metal detectorist Dan Benoit is helping Maine property owners uncover more about the history of their homes.
Benoit, who moved to Richmond five years ago from the Boston area, has been metal detecting as a hobby for years but committed to it during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was then he began traveling out to local homes in his spare time to volunteer his services to anyone interested.
Many Mainers have taken him up on the offer. As a result, Benoit has unearthed dozens of treasures around the midcoast ranging from the sentimental — like a toy car from an older gentleman’s boyhood — to old coins minted all over the globe. Benoit records his findings on his Bluesky account, “Dig it Dan,” which has amassed more than 8,000 followers in just a month.
“I didn’t really expect it to kind of get this kind of attention so quickly,” Benoit said. “It’s super rewarding … I can find an item and really know nothing about the history around it, and then it opens a whole new rabbit hole into something that I had no idea about.”
Benoit gives his findings — often buttons, buckles, coins or musket balls — back to the owner for them to display. He wants to monetize his hobby and work closely with archaeologists to better contextualize the items. But the proliferating number of detectorists across the country has concerned those scientists who say that one-off finds can damage historical sites.
For Rusty Dewsnap, a Dresden native with roughly 36 acres across from Little Swan Island, Benoit gave him a better understanding of who might have first populated his 1788 property. Over a few months last summer, Benoit came out to his property and dug up objects including several coins minted in Ireland. His most interesting find was a large cent from 1802 that had presumably been counterstamped by a local merchant.
“It was fun to have him approach the house every now and then with a bunch of things that he found,” Dewsnap said. “I’m an older fellow, and when I’m gone, I’m hoping to leave everything [he found] with the house.”
While it’s legal for metal detectorists to dig on personal property with the owner’s permission, not everyone is convinced that they should always do it. There’s a concern within the archaeological community that hobbyists “loot” and compromise the integrity of dig sites.
“Metal detecting, unfortunately, is often seen in a negative light,” Timothy Dinsmore, a historical archaeologist based in midcoast Maine, said. “I totally understand the thrill of finding stuff … but as an archaeologist, it really destroys the sites.”
Archaeologists are slow and methodical when extracting artifacts from the ground, Dinsmore said. They map out sites laterally and vertically before digging and pay attention to the context the object was found in, such as the different layers in the soil around it. If someone simply pulls something from a site, it only provides a partial historic record of what happened there.
“The context in which those artifacts are found in the ground can tell you as much as the artifacts themselves,” Dinsmore said. “Most detectorists are well intended and have a deep interest and passion for history, but the very activity in which they search for that history inevitably results in its loss.”
Benoit understands the reticence, but he said he takes great care to minimally disturb the ground and wishes archaeologists would embrace detectorists like himself. They could even work together to identify dig sites around Maine, he suggested.
“It’s true that a lot of metal detectorists are just treasure hunters looking to steal valuable objects, or [they] just do beaches, find jewelry and bring it straight to the pawn shop,” Benoit said. “Those things don’t appeal to me at all. I love recovering history.”
