BOSTON (AP) — For generations, Boston families have gathered on the gently sloping green lawns surrounding the Bunker Hill Monument to play and enjoy picnics — all while remnants of one of the American Revolution’s most pivotal battles lay quietly buried just beneath the surface.
Now, guided by a map that is centuries old, a team of archaeologists has been carefully excavating the park that marks the spot where American patriots hurriedly built an earthen fortification in an effort to slow the advance of British forces during what history remembers as the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Using ground-penetrating radar, researchers pinpointed possible locations of the fort within Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood. Shortly after breaking ground on the first trench, the team — led by Joe Bagley, the city of Boston’s official archaeologist — discovered clear evidence of a ditch that had been dug in the hours leading up to the battle on June 17, 1775, one of the earliest engagements of the American Revolution.
“The part that’s really crazy to me is that we get to stand in the same ditch,” Bagley said, speaking from one of two active dig sites where workers remove soil roughly four inches at a time, place it into buckets, and sift it through screens. Every item uncovered is bagged and catalogued.
The excavation has already produced musket balls and pieces of a musket from the battle itself. Researchers also recovered objects believed to have been left by British soldiers who held the area following the battle, among them tea cups, tobacco pipes, sleeve buttons, and a wig curler. Although nearly 150 combatants lost their lives at the site, no human remains have been found — though a forensic archaeologist is present to examine any bones that may surface.
“Everything about the ditch is from 1775. You’ve got musket balls, gun flints. It’s what you would expect to see,” Bagley said. “It’s pretty powerful because these things are being dropped in the middle of the battle.”
While many people associate the beginning of the American Revolution with the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, a number of historians consider Bunker Hill and June 17 to represent the war’s first truly significant military engagement.
The colonial rebels had originally planned to fortify Bunker Hill — a 110-foot-high slope in Charlestown situated across the Charles River from British-held Boston — in anticipation of a possible British assault. For reasons that remain unclear to historians, they instead took up a position on a smaller and more exposed ridge called Breed’s Hill, where the bulk of the fighting occurred.
Though the battle concluded with the rebels withdrawing, the British suffered more than 1,000 casualties in the process. Bunker Hill is frequently viewed as a moral victory for the American side, as the British failed to achieve a decisive win and the engagement helped unite the colonies in their resistance. A 221-foot white stone obelisk now stands atop Breed’s Hill as a memorial to the battle.
At the dig site, battlefield archaeologist Joel Bohy, who focuses on identifying weaponry from the American Revolution, expressed amazement at what the earth has given up. One volunteer cradled two jagged stones in her hand — a gray English gun flint and a beige French gun flint. When a musket’s trigger was pulled, the flint would strike steel, creating sparks that set off the gunpowder charge.
Eight marble-sized musket balls from both sides of the conflict were also recovered. The shape and markings on some of the balls indicated they had been fired but had not struck anyone — rounds that hit a person would have been visibly deformed.
“You can see the ramrod mark from when the soldier rammed it down. You can see the little ring on the top where it was pushed down,” Bohy said, noting that “marks on the edge of the ball” confirm it had been fired.
On the night before the battle, more than 1,000 provincial soldiers and local residents used pickaxes and shovels to dig through the darkness and construct a ditch three feet deep and more than six feet wide. The excavated soil was piled in front of the ditch to form a six-foot-high wall, or parapet, that stretched 150 feet along each of the fort’s four sides.
A map created by Henry Pelham just two months after the battle depicted a square redoubt on Breed’s Hill. Until this current dig, however, no one had physically confirmed that the shape shown on the map was accurate. Earlier excavations conducted in the 1990s had turned up battle-related items and some indications of the ditches, but nothing conclusive.
“If you come to the site, we have the monument, we have a lot of maps on display, and the landscape is beautiful. But you can’t really see the fort, the fortifications that were built,” Bagley said. “Very little of what’s here visibly is from 1775. So, this trench is the reason why all of this is here.”
In addition to locating the fort itself, the dig is giving visitors the opportunity to hold “a piece of the battle in their hand,” Bohy said. “In a way, it makes the history more dimensional when you look at these objects from the battle itself.”
A group of tourists from Colorado paused to observe the ongoing work. One of them, Greg Nockleby, who had spent a week in Boston exploring American history, described the scene as a “wonderful surprise.”
“A live dig happening right now to uncover our nation’s history is amazing,” he said. “To see that there has been people here who have died for our freedom and our nation is very immersive.”
