From the earliest days of my childhood, the sand has meant fun. From making large, lumpy sandcastles to taking long, barefoot walks toward a distant sunset, I’ve never needed an excuse to visit any beach. But I never thought of the sand as a place to find antiques, learn about geology, or see living history—until I scoured a beach with Deacon Ritterbush, aka Dr. Beachcomb.

Ritterbush started her Archaeologists at the Beach beachcombing workshops last February. At least once a month, except in July and August, she leads a tour to one of many beaches on the Chesapeake Bay to see what’s washed up on shore. Most of her Bayside walks start from the porch of her home, where she’s currently writing the first of seven planned books on searching the sands, The Beachcomber’s Odyssey: Treasures from a Collected Past, due to be published in the fall.

In her close-knit community of Bay Ridge, located just outside of Annapolis, Ritterbush has a growing reputation for being one of the region’s best guides to the dunes. This is a woman who has sand in her blood. “I was raised on the beach, by beach people,” says the fifty-five-year-old mom of three of her childhood, spent running from her mother’s Bay Ridge cottage to the Chesapeake waters. She went on to earn a bachelor of arts degree in anthropology, a master’s degree in Pacific Island Studies, and a Ph.D. in political science and spent twenty-nine years living in Hawaii and the South Pacific. (She’s married to a Tongan archaeologist.) She decided to return to Bay Ridge from Hawaii after the birth of her third child, settling right back into the family house she loved as a girl.

“I grew up here. I love it here. The stuff I find here—you really find history and anthropology. You find culture.”

“Welcome to my beach lab!”

Ritterbush exclaims, as I enter her wooden cottage. My guide, sporting a loose cotton shift, bathing suit, shorts, and bare feet, leads me through her home, filled with eclectic wooden antique furniture and a killer view of the suspended arcs of the Bay Bridge. She brings me to a bright sunroom filled with trays of beach glass, quartz, pottery shards, and shells. This is where she starts her tours with a brief talk about the history and geology of the Bay and by showing tourgoers the objects they are likely to find. Me and my fellow beachcombers, Ritterbush’s three children, five of her neighbors, and two repeat tourgoers from Virginia, watch her pour water into two glass baking pans filled with colorful quartz pebbles to bring out their color.

The small round rocks glisten, the precursors of tiny grains of sand that ends up on the Bay’s beaches.

Ritterbush goes on to tell us that the Chesapeake is a prime beachcombing territory; its gentle waves and millennia of human habitation combine to make it a great place to look for intact historical objects. And her beach lab is filled with them: aged pieces of brick from Victorian-era construction, small animal skulls, multicolored beach glass.

“Beachcombing is so much more than shell-seeking,” she says, holding up a small piece of rare red glass: the eye of a duck decoy. “Duck hunting is so indigenous to the Bay. You would never find this in the ocean; it would be ground up.”

She shows us other objects from the Bay’s earliest residents, the Piscataway, Choptank, and Algonquin Indians: flint arrowheads, fishing weights, and clay carvings. “One of my all-time favorite finds,” she explains, “is a porcelain campaign button from the Victorian era that reads ‘Lawrence for Governor.’ I’ve never see anything like that in years of collecting.” 

Ritterbush winds up the talk by telling us about a few of the types of glass that can be found on the world’s beaches: sea pebbles and sea glass (pieces of glass rounded by wave action), beach glass (which has a shiny side and a matte side scoured by sand), bonfire glass (twisted, melted bottle shards), window glass, and broken glass (aka litter). The last four can be found on Bay beaches, which is good because after learning about all of these potential finds, I’m itching to get out there. 

It’s just a short walk to what Ritterbush calls “Brick Beach,” after all the varieties of brick that she finds there. (She and her kids have nicknames for all of her favorite spots.) “The lesson beach- combing teaches is not to hoard,” she explains. “There’s plenty to go around. New stuff washes up every day.”

She points us to the prime ’combing real estate, the tide line, where the waves are breaking, and, above that, the drift line, which marks high tide. Ritterbush’s eleven-year-old son, Tali, is already knee-deep in the water, pulling up rounded jewels of quartz and skipping rocks. Two local mothers, Leann Ruland and Jane Velie Waters, are collecting gleaming purple mussel shells. Leann’s eight-year-old son, Michael, is eagerly scanning the sand, shyly showing our guide his pebbles and shells, while behind him, an earnest high school senior, Trevor Halstead, is equally absorbed in looking at pieces of old burned bricks, which could likely be remnants of the Bay Ridge Hotel, which burned in 1915, ending the community’s days as a glamorous Victorian resort. Ritterbush watches us turn things over with our fingers and toes, continually driving home one message: Slow down. “People walk fast, and they think, ‘Oh, there’s not much here.” she says. “It’s when you learn how to slow down and look that you find things.”

She encourages us to pick up items that we would normally classify as junk and think about how they fit into the geological, historical, or environmental story of the Chesapeake. I’ve just found an example: a sand-encrusted chunk of metal, which, my guide tells me, has a surprising origin. “That’s iron ore,” she says, a common find from a deposit just offshore. “Geologically, this is a very interesting area,” she continues. “In winter, when the wind blows the sand away, you can see clay and iron deposits underneath.” I decide to pocket the find, feeling like I’ve truly mined the beaches.

Walking further along the shoreline, my eyes gravitate to a rippled piece of milky glass: the mouth of an old bottle. Our guide tells the group how to guess the age of the piece. Seems that glass made before 1930 has bubbles in it. I peer at the piece and sure enough, I see bubbles. “It’s not just collecting colors,” she says. “It’s collecting bits of history and culture, how people lived, what they drank, what they used. They are links to the past.”

Marty Hays, a more experienced tourgoer, approaches with a handful of pearly white beach glass that she’s collected. Ritterbush prods a couple of pieces and says, “Needs about twenty more years of seasoning, don’t you think?” I follow as Hays walks out onto the jetty and sprinkles the glass back into the Bay. “I’m re-gifting it,” she says. “Given from the sea, given back to the sea. Maybe I’ll pick it up next time.”

As a newly minted beachcombing convert, I might beat her to it. 

Sara Edelson writes from her home in Washington, D.C.

For more information, visit http://www.drbeachcomb.com.  Workshop group rates run from $400-$500 for up to ten people. Special shorter workshops are offered for families.