AUBURN — Karen Ferguson of Auburn walked into the Fireside Inn on Tuesday afternoon with a box full of artifacts she thought were small treasures: an old seal-fur coat made by the Boston Fur Co., glass beads used by European merchants to trade with Native Americans, clam-shell buttons from before the days of plastic.

Unfortunately, those sorts of artifacts weren’t quite what the Treasure Hunters Roadshow was looking for. Set up in the Auburn hotel all week, the traveling appraisers of precious metals, antiques and musical instruments didn’t offer much for the historic pieces, many of which Ferguson dug up while searching for antique bottles on the islands near Portland. Gold and silver are worth a lot, she said, “But artifacts aren’t. They belong in museums, I guess.”

Ferguson was happy to walk away with about $50 for a pair of slightly beat-up guitars and some old costume jewelry.

The Roadshow’s buyers gravitate toward gold and silver, memorabilia from the Beatles and World War II or earlier, and vintage guitars, field manager Nathan Harding said. They pay on the spot, by check, and will look at just about anything put in front of them, although that doesn’t mean they’ll buy it.

Some people come just to find out the worth of family keepsakes and objects of sentimental value, Harding said.

“We try to keep it pretty low-pressure for people,” he said. “We let them know what it’s worth, and if they want to keep it, keep it.”

Harding and fellow field manager Don Ody, who travel for several weeks at a time, scoping out people’s real and imagined treasures day after day, worked late Tuesday evening to research and price each coin in a large collection brought in by a pair of sisters from Auburn. The sisters, who did not want to give their names because of privacy concerns, were selling their father’s collection of U.S. commemorative coins to help pay for their aging mother’s medical care.

They had researched the prices of the coins before approaching the roadshow, something Ody said he wishes everyone would do, and found that the roadshow wouldn’t offer what they had expected for a number of the coins. Most were newer coins, from the 1980s, and weren’t rare enough to be particularly valuable to collectors. But others were made of pure gold and silver, and with prices for those precious metals hovering near all-time record highs, the coins were literally worth their weight.

In the end, the pair sold most of the collection for a total of several thousand dollars. “I feel OK with the price,” said one of the sisters. “It’s just sentimental. The biggest thing is to keep our mom at home, and that’s the reason I’m happy with it.”