Archaeologists find musket balls and fort linked to Battle of Bunker Hill

The battle ended with the rebels in retreat, but not before the British had sustained more than 1,000 casualties. Bunker Hill is often portrayed as an American victory, since the British failed to win decisively and it served to galvanize the colonies against the British.

Today, a 221ft white obelisk atop Breed’s Hill memorializes the battle.

On Wednesday, a church service in Charlestown will be followed by a procession that makes its way to the Bunker Hill Monument. A remembrance ceremony will be held there that includes a wreath-laying, moment of silence and musket firing demonstration. The dig also ends on Wednesday.

At the dig site, Joel Bohy, a battlefield archaeologist who specializes in identifying American Revolution weaponry, marveled at what had been pulled from the dirt. One volunteer held in her hand two jagged stones — the gray one was an English gun flint while a beige one was a French gun flint. When the trigger on the musket was pulled, flint struck the steel, producing sparks that ignited the gunpowder.

They also found eight marbled-sized musket balls from both sides in the battle. The markings and shape of some bullets showed they had been fired from a distance but didn’t hit anyone. If they had, the balls would have been deformed.

Calla Ruff, an intern from Carleton College, sifts dirt removed from an archaeological dig at the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill on Monday. Photograph: Charles Krupa/AP

“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, adding that “marks on the edge of the ball” show that it had been fired.

Using pickaxes and shovels, more than 1,000 provincials and residents dug through the night to construct a ditch that was 3ft deep and over 6ft wide. They shoveled the soil in front of the ditch to make a 6ft-high wall or parapet that reached 150ft long on each of the four sides.

A map drawn by Henry Pelham two months after the battle showed a square redoubt on Breed’s Hill. But it wasn’t until the dig that anyone had confirmed the shape in the map was accurate. Previous digs in the 1990s had found items related to the battle and some evidence of the ditches.

“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.”

Beyond locating the fort, the dig also provides visitors a chance 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.”

Several tourists from Colorado stopped by to watch the dig. One visitor, Greg Nockleby, who had spent a week in Boston learning about American history, said watching the archaeologists at work was 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.”