250 years later, new history is discovered since the first major battle of the American Revolution

On June 17, 1775, some 1,000 rebel colonial soldiers confronted the British war machine on a hill on a peninsula north of Boston, allegedly conserving their scarce ammunition by waiting to fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes.

The Battle of Bunker Hill, as it became famous:although misleading– known, occurred as the revolutionaries sought to contain British troops in the city and worked to fortify its surroundings. Although the British ultimately won the battle, they suffered heavy losses, giving George Washington time to drive them from the region the following spring.

Although the battle has become part of Revolutionary War lore, being widely known does not guarantee that it is fully understood. This is why archaeologists decided to celebrate America’s 250th birthday with a new dig at the battle site using much more detailed radar scans than were available during a previous survey in the 1990s. The dig focused on the “Rebel Redoubt” fortification that the Patriots had built on Breed’s Hill, the current site of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Scientific American spoke to Joe Bagley, the city of Boston archaeologist, about what the team discovered.

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[[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

What did you find on the site? Was there anything particularly exciting?

From the battle itself we found seven musket balls and three gunflints. The gunflints could have come from both sides, because they used the same gunflints. Musket balls are both provincial (or American) and British, depending on their size. We have an expert who will study each one very carefully and give us a full report on who shot, what happened, how they were shot, what they hit, that sort of thing. We will have an exact account of all this.

The other thing that was really exciting was that we started finding a lot of tea utensils, like broken teacups and bowls, things that would be part of a dining set, quite chic. We found wig curlers – which would have been a men’s item – and some really fancy buttons. So there’s all this really cool stuff. From the battle in June until March of the following year, there were about a hundred soldiers and six officers stationed in the redoubt, so it seems we were finding things from them. Were they taken to neighboring houses? Were they taken overseas with the troops? This is part of the research that remains to be done.

There’s a lot more stuff on the site than we actually expected, and our job now will be to get through it all. We have to wash it, we have to sort it, we have to catalog it, and then we have to understand what it says on the site. This will take a minute to go through.

What big questions about the battle did you hope the excavation could shed light on?

One of the big questions we ask is essentially: How structured were the efforts put into the battle by those who were organizing what they did not know was going to be the first battle of the Revolution?

The farmers went to the site without knowing that they were going to build a fort there, and they had absolutely no idea that the next day they were going to start a massive battle with the largest army in the world. What were they asked to do and how big was this request? Was it just like, it’s the middle of the night, we’re going to try to fortify this hill? Were they trying to go for a really structured fort, or were they just trying to get by?

“When the first flint came out, it brought out the horror of the whole affair”—Joe Bagley, Boston City Archaeologist

An earlier version of the survey done up there concluded that the fort was basically a sloppy oval on top of the hill, and then every map drew these neat little squares and angles, like they were there with a protractor making the fort. The results that we’re seeing from the radar really make it look like they were building this much more structured, designed, angular fort, and I think that just speaks to the ambition of people in that first phase.

It’s just a matter of trying to get an accurate representation of what really happened up there. For me, when the first flint came out, it brought home the horror of the whole thing. There’s this tendency to romanticize and dramatize things, but the reality is that it was hell. These people were afraid, they were courageous, but they were terrified. [The British] set fire to [nearby Charlestown]so there was this column of black smoke that rose up and overhung the actual battlefield for hundreds of feet, probably thousands of feet. The sound of all the musket shots, the cannons, the screams. It was a bloody, bloody war. And hundreds of people were killed – people were walking and slipping in blood.

We were basically digging at the site of a massacre, and I think that’s an important part of history for people to remember. If we only talk about the heroism of it all, it minimizes the reality of how difficult this situation is.

What was it like searching there?

I’m not a big fan of the military, but I knew it was a place where people died, and it was a huge responsibility. Knowing that I’m going to try to tell the story of people who didn’t get to tell their story after that day, that’s a heavy thing. Being there that day with them when you find the musket ball that pierced them or the flint that was in their pocket and slipped away as they ran for their lives, it’s like you were there. The last time he interacted with another person was the day the person who put him in his pocket died or fled for his life. It’s a tingling moment.