Identification of non-gold mineralogy in gold-bearing ground

[nexusb]

Hi all,

I apologise if this is in the wrong section, but I figured that people hunting gold may have run into a similar situation.

Recently, I was doing some digging with my Equinox 800 on some private land in Creswick.

Came across a quite solid target, so I started digging. Scraped away the top soil and found red-orange clay; my target was still in the ground.

After digging another couple of inches, I reached a layer of gravel - it had a very dark grey colour (but was not charcoal) - kind of the colour of oxidised silver.

Underneath that dark layer, was more red clay - it was almost like this mysterious layer was sandwiched between two layers of clay.

I pulled out the below, which appears to be a nugget of some kind:

Does anybody have any idea about how I can go about identifying this? Pretty sure there's more of it in the ground where I was digging. Sanded a little bit of it back and it seems metallic, but doesn't seem to be lead (not abnormally heavy, doesn't rub off onto paper).

Any assistance you're able to provide would be amazing!

Thanks,

NexusB

 

[grubstake]

Unfortunately, your pics aren't very clear, but from what I can see, that pebble appears to be a mixture of ironstone (grey/black), quartz (white) and iron pyrites (yellowish, metallic-looking, aka 'fools gold'). But the whitish-looking parts may just be reflections - it's difficult to tell.

 

[nexusb]

Unfortunately, your pics aren't very clear, but from what I can see, that pebble appears to be a mixture of ironstone (grey/black), quartz (white) and iron pyrites (yellowish, metallic-looking, aka 'fools gold'). But the whitish-looking parts may just be reflections - it's difficult to tell.

Thanks for your thoughts, grubstake.

I'll see if I can clean it up a little bit more and get a better photo.