A recent archaeological dig searching for fortifications at the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown unearthed musket balls, gun flints, personal items from soldiers and new details about what happened during that pivotal and bloody conflict more than 250 years ago. Boston City archaeologist Joe Bagley spoke with GBH’s Morning Edition host, Tori Bedford, to share details from the dig. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Tori Bedford: So, you were looking for this fortification that was built there, right? But it’s made of earth. So, how do you go about finding something like that, this earth fortification that’s built but also then buried under the ground?
Joe Bagley: So, the fort that was made overnight in about five hours, it was basically the most simple thing you could build to be a fort. You would dig a trench, you would pile the dirt up next to that trench, and so it creates this kind of ditch and then immediately next to the ditch, an earthen wall. Then you stand behind that wall, and it allows you to be protected, and it creates a bigger barrier for people who come and attack. So, over the years, that would have eroded, and then ultimately it was leveled in order to build the monument that you see today. So, there’s no visible evidence of that fortification, but the trench that they actually dug, that would have likely survived by being filled in. So, what we were really looking for is evidence of a linear area that has a different kind of density of soil. That could be what’s left of the outline of the fort, because the parapet, which is the wall, that would have been erased not too long afterward, and certainly by the time the monument went up.
Bedford: What did you find in that trench?
Bagley: The trench was fascinating. We found that the trench had been filled partially during the actual war itself, which we were expecting that to have happened much later in the 1800's and even 1900's. But as we were digging it, we realized that you could see the actual layers of soil coming down into the trench, and the artifacts in that included things like musket balls, gun flints, some of the artifacts from the British that occupied the fort after the battle. Then it clicked that what we were actually seeing was this dirt wall that had been built in a couple of hours eroding back into the trench days, weeks, months after the battle because it was just a dirt wall. Boston summers have a lot of rain, so every time it rained, that earth would slide back down into the hole. And so, what we were seeing was just the natural erosion of that wall immediately following the battle, bringing with it artifacts from the battle, so it was partially filled probably within a couple of months of the battle.
Bedford: Did you find anything in there that really surprised you?
Bagley: Yes. The fact that we found anything in it, to be really honest, was surprising. Basically, the day of and the day after and soon after, people were picking up souvenirs. Collecting stuff that they could actually reuse. So, we were expecting the place to be really picked over immediately. We weren’t really expecting to see evidence of the battle in the sense of like gunflints and musket balls. We were excited that we found numerous of those. But the part that was exciting that we weren’t quite expecting was also the British encampment that was inside the fort following the battle, finding artifacts that likely relate to them, given that they weren’t there for very long. They would’ve left by Evacuation Day. We just weren’t expecting to see as much stuff from them.
Bedford: What kind of stuff indicated to you that it was from them?
Bagley: We were finding broken dishes that they would’ve taken from the nearby houses. Some of the surprises were like fancy buttons from some of the officers who were there. We know there were at least six officers who were stationed there. The most humorous artifact was a very large wig curler. This would’ve been a men’s artifact at the time and the soldiers — the British soldiers who were there, the King’s troops — they were actually required as part of their uniform to have a white wig. So, these men who were camped out in this fortification that they took over after the battle were having these wigs probably on makeshift stands that they were then having to curl the hair so that they could be presentable as the King’s troops if they ever had to present themselves or join a battle.
Bedford: What happens now in terms of your research and discovery about this site?
Bagley: Archaeology is like an iceberg. The part above the water is all the work that goes into a dig. The thin line at the actual water’s surface, that’s the dig. And then everything underneath the iceberg, under the water, is all of the work that happens afterward. So, we’re very much in that underwater iceberg phase, the biggest part of it. We just finished washing all the artifacts from that collection that we recovered this week. And so we’re now at the point where we’re going to be inventorying and cataloging every single thing that we found. Photographing it, and then we start to kind of piece it together, not literally, but kind of like taking each artifact as like a page from a book and assembling the story that we can get out of each of every single artifact that we find.
We’re going to be spending the next weeks to months doing that as part of our analysis. The same experts who we had on the dig, like Joel Bohy, who’s a firearms and ammunition expert, he’s coming back to the lab to look at the musket balls, to look at the gun flints and do really in-depth analysis on exactly how these were fired, what they hit, what they were fired from, were they the king’s troops? Were they the provincial troops? And all of that’s going to come together and create a new narrative, refining what we already knew about readout and possibly resetting some of the story into a new or alternative version of what we’ve been hearing and learning about for 250 years.
Bedford: And what’s the site for your next big dig?
Bagley: Well, at this point we are looking at pivoting away from the Revolution for a little bit. And we have two projects, one in Jamaica Plain and one in the South End, that are schools from the 19th century that are no longer schools. In the backyards of both of them are outhouses and we’re going to be deploying our crew out to those neighborhoods to take a look at the outhouses. If we find them, they will be massive. There’s a 90-foot outhouse that we’re actually looking at at one of the sites. And that’s a very different set of artifacts, a very different story to be told than what we see at the American Revolution sites. But definitely a missing piece of the history of Boston, the children of the 19th century and what they can tell us about what happened in these neighborhoods.
Bedford: What do you find in an outhouse?
Bagley: “What don’t you find” is more like it. This is the place where all the secrets end up. So, the stuff that you drop casually that you hopefully don’t go back in to get, the stuff that you’re hiding from people, the stuff that you’ve taken from people and then any of the food that you’ve consumed will pass through you and end up in the outhouses. And so, we should be getting an unvarnished, unedited history of what it was like to be a school kid in these neighborhoods. Frankly, we don’t know what we’re going to find out and that’s part of the excitement.
