#  Video: The Archaeology of Boston's Revolutionary Past 

 



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Join Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley for a presentation on archaeological research that is deepening our understanding of Boston’s role in the American Revolution. Bagley shares new findings on the impact of the Siege of Boston and the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill—the first major battle of the war—on the people of Boston. Although named for Bunker Hill, the highest hill in Charlestown, north of Boston, the battle actually took place on Breed’s Hill, located closer to the Charles River. Bagley will outline plans to pinpoint the exact location of the Breed’s Hill redoubt and to search for more than 200 unmarked graves of fallen soldiers. He also discusses forthcoming investigations of the “lost forts” of Roxbury, once positioned on a hill overlooking Roxbury Neck, the only land route out of Boston in the late eighteenth century. Explore the hidden Revolutionary War landscape beneath modern Boston and Charlestown with the city’s lead archaeologist as your guide.

Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. This lecture is presented to mark the 250th Anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.

*Recorded April 9, 2026*

### About the Speaker

**Joe Bagley** joined the City Archaeology Program in 2011 as the fourth City Archaeologist since the program started in 1983. He manages a team of archaeologists working on collections housed at the City Archaeology Laboratory in West Roxbury, regulates archaeological sites in Boston, manages Rainsford Island, and conducts community archaeology projects throughout the city with a focus on highlighting underrepresented histories. Joe holds a BA in Archaeology from Boston University and an MA in Historical Archaeology from UMass Boston. He has published three books: *A History of Boston in 50 Artifacts* (2016), *Boston's Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them* (2021), and coauthored *The Historical Archaeology of Massachusetts* (2026). He specializes in historical archaeology and ancient Native American archaeology of New England. In 2026, Joe will be leading a team of archaeologists seeking to uncover more information about Boston’s role in the American Revolution.

### Transcript

The Archaeology of Boston's Revolutionary Past

\[00:00:06.28\] Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming. Thanks to those logging in on Zoom for tonight's lecture. My name is Caroline Jean Fernald. I'm the executive director of Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, a partnership of four public-serving museums, where our mission is to connect collections and research at Harvard with global audiences, fostering community, and deepening appreciation for science, the natural world, human cultures, and our shared experiences.

\[00:00:33.64\] With this mission in mind, I am delighted to welcome you to tonight's program, sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. Tonight, we are honored to welcome Joe Bagley, Boston City archaeologist, and director of archaeology at the Boston Archaeology Program, who will discuss current archaeological research that is deepening our understanding of Boston's role in the American Revolution.

\[00:00:57.32\] This talk is the fourth and final event in a semester-long series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The series explores key moments of the American Revolution that help us understand how the United States took shape as a nation.

\[00:01:13.28\] HMSC's partnership of museums crosses many disciplines, and we host a wide array of events throughout the year at our four museums. Join us on Sunday, April 12 for the family-friendly, amazing archaeology fair. Meet experts and animal bones, Egyptian tombs and hieroglyphs, cave art, Inca quipus, ancient chemical mysteries-- what's that? And more. You'll find out on Sunday.

\[00:01:37.44\] On Tuesday, April 14, we will welcome Denise Doxsey from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, who will discuss a 25th Dynasty Nubian queen's mysterious mortuary offerings and treasures. And on Wednesday, April 15, Neil Shubin, from the University of Chicago, will give the 2026 John M. Prather Lecture, explaining how major evolutionary transitions occur and what they reveal about humans' place in nature.

\[00:02:02.12\] To learn more about additional upcoming museum events, I invite you to visit our website, HMSC.Harvard.edu, where you can sign up for our newsletter, or you can also follow us on social media. We are grateful to all of our members and supporters for making these programs possible. I will now turn it over to Diana Loren, senior curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, who will introduce our speaker. Thank you.

\[00:02:24.38\] \[APPLAUSE\]

\[00:02:28.52\] Thanks for joining us tonight. It is my great privilege to welcome Joe Bagley for his talk tonight. I call Joe one of the hardest working people in archaeology, and you'll see that that's true after his talk. So let me tell you a little bit about him.

\[00:02:43.04\] Joe Bagley joined the City Archaeology Program in 2011, as the fourth city archaeologist since the program began in 1983. He manages a team of archaeologists working on collections housed at the City Archaeology Lab in West Roxbury. He also regulates archaeological sites in Boston, manages Rainsford Island, and conducts community archaeology projects throughout the city with a focus on highlighting underrepresented histories.

\[00:03:13.28\] Joe received his bachelor's degree in archaeology from BU and his master's degree in historical archaeology from UMass Boston. He has published three books-- go out and buy them-- A History of Boston in 50 Artifacts, which was published in 2016, Boston's Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them, which was published in 2021, and most recently, he co-authored The Historical Archaeology of Massachusetts in 2026.

\[00:03:42.60\] He works both in historical archaeology and ancient Native archaeology of New England, with specialties in ceramic history and lithic studies. He has led major projects, including the digitization of collections from sites including the Paul Revere House, Faneuil Hall, Boston Common, recataloguing the 1635 to 1665 James Garrett House site, and the slavery in Boston exhibit and website of Faneuil Hall. He doesn't rest. \[LAUGHS\]

\[00:04:14.12\] In 2026, Joe will be leading the Jack and Acton Project to reveal the works and contributions of enslaved potters in the Charleston red earthenware industry. And he will also be leading new excavations of the 1775 Patriot redoubt from the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charleston. Join me in welcoming Joe.

\[00:04:35.70\] \[APPLAUSE\]

\[00:04:39.45\] Great. Thank you all for joining, everyone here tonight. I appreciate it. And I was staring at my slide while sitting down there, and it's like, wow, I put Boston up there three times. So if you can't figure out what we're talking about tonight, that's on you.

\[00:04:52.80\] So what I'm going to be talking about is the work that we're doing to use archaeology specifically to answer research questions and just generally fill in some of the gaps that we have about history surrounding the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.

\[00:05:10.68\] A quick spoiler alert. That happened last year in Boston, except for the Evacuation Day. That just happened in March. So we're kind of playing a little bit catch up on this. So it's really our 251st year. But we aren't done working on this. So we're going to count it as part of the 250th. And the whole country is celebrating, obviously, this year.

\[00:05:30.56\] I'm going to begin in Charlestown and really focus a lot of my time on that part of the city, mostly because of the combination of events that have happened there, but also a lot of the archaeology that we've done in and around Charlestown, both prior and coming up, really. And then I'm also going to talk tonight about some of the work that we're going to be doing this summer, finishing our work in Charlestown, but also pivoting to other neighborhoods in Boston, to look at some of the archaeology that could be found. Because all the neighborhoods of Boston really participated in the American Revolution.

\[00:06:03.79\] So I think for Charlestown, I want to lay the scene a little bit. I'm not going to go in depth into everything that happened during the Battle of Bunker Hill and the early American history in Charlestown, the battle itself, other than to lay the scene as to where we are in space and time.

\[00:06:18.99\] So for those of you unfamiliar with the neighborhood of Charlestown-- we're very close to it right now. It's a triangular area of peninsula. It's about one square mile total. It's just northwest of Boston. At the time of the American Revolution, it was its own town, which extended all the way up to Medford.

\[00:06:36.79\] The landscape that we're going to primarily focus on are the hills of Charlestown and the downtown area of Charlestown. The downtown area is really on the southeast part. That was the area first settled by European colonists. In 1629, there was the village of Mishawum, part of the Massachusetts tribal-- one of the tribal band headquarters, just to one of the lobes on the southern part of the peninsula.

\[00:07:06.19\] You have Moulton's Point, which is the northeast corner of Charlestown. It was a small hill. And then you have the large hills of Charlestown, Bunker's Hill, Breed's Hill. I'm going to get really in depth into the names of Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill, because literally today, we made some pretty interesting finds in the research, just getting prepped for this.

\[00:07:27.15\] And then on the evening of June 16, 1775, a group of about 2,000 Patriots gathered here, in Cambridge, and then marched to Charlestown at night to fortify a hill in order to give the rebels some chance of preventing the British from attacking the town. They were told to fortify Bunker Hill, and we'll come back to that story.

\[00:07:56.31\] What they ultimately fortified was Breed's Hill. And on this map, it's essentially the center part of the map, with a square redoubt, about 130-foot square. We'll talk more about what a redoubt is when we talk more about the redoubt part.

\[00:08:10.59\] But extending north from the redoubt was what's called a breastwork, which is essentially a wall that looked just like the redoubt, but just a wall. And then that transitioned to an area that was a fence that was fortified at night and armed and lined with troops facing eastward.

\[00:08:30.67\] In response, the British attacked at dawn, when they saw all of these fortifications. They heard it going on at night. They knew something was happening, but they couldn't tell what. When the sun came up, they saw this fort on top of Breed's Hill. They fired upon the town. And one of the more important parts of this story was that they burned the city to the ground. And I think this is one of the most under-told stories of the American Revolution, is that as part of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the town of Charlestown was erased.

\[00:08:58.31\] And as much as the battle shook the colonists to the core, the king's troops would actually attack a redoubt and essentially start one of the major battles of the Revolution. It was also the fact that the king would destroy an entire town in response to fortification. That was one of the things that really got quite a few of the fence sitters off of the fence in support of the Patriot cause. This is just a zoomed-in version. We'll talk a little bit more about the layout.

\[00:09:32.95\] But this is a painting that came out soon after the actual battle, depicting at least an artist's depiction of the burning of Charlestown. I think it really captures the extent of the loss. We actually have records from Roxbury of people seeing the battle. They could hear the firing. They could hear something going on, but it was the column of black smoke rising up from Charlestown on a blue sky day that really told people that something terrible was happening on that June day.

\[00:10:05.31\] After the battle, the town was left completely in ruins. And that's where we're going to pick up some of that story about what happened to Charlestown, both before the Revolution and after the Revolution.

\[00:10:16.79\] So we approached this project with several goals. What we really wanted to do was to look at Charlestown as a microcosm of any town in Boston, in the Boston area, but with a real focus, if we could, on the people of Charlestown. So many people are celebrating and talking about the American Revolution, the battle itself. But there were around 2,000 people living in Charlestown who quite literally lost almost everything that they had.

\[00:10:41.63\] We wanted to tell their story as well, because they were as much a part of this day in American history as the soldiers were. And in some ways, they may have been actually more impacted, other than the soldiers who were injured and died.

\[00:10:55.07\] We also wanted to look at the town of Charlestown to see whose histories we could potentially uncover, both literally and figuratively, who were not typically included in those narratives. So in this case, it would be people of color, women, children, elderly, people with disabilities. All of those people were represented in fairly large numbers in Charlestown. And we really didn't have-- I didn't have any idea of what their lives were like before the war, during the war, and after.

\[00:11:24.43\] And then one of the biggest things that we'll focus on this year is testing the legends, which is essentially-- when you don't have a lot of pieces of the puzzle, people tend to make up their own pieces. And so over the years, I've heard stories from Charlestown residents about where bodies are buried and where the fort exactly is. And one of our goals was to see if we can actually use archaeology to test some of those ideas and, ideally, correct the errors or prove that these legends are true.

\[00:11:53.91\] So early on in our research, we came across a throwaway sentence in one of the archaeological reports from the Big Dig that essentially said, the Boston Public Library has all the claims documents from the Charlestown residents.

\[00:12:05.77\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:12:07.47\] So then we went on a quest to see if we could find these documents, and they had been summarized in a report that was then published quite a few times, but nobody had gone through and written about individual claims at an individual level. So we reached out to our friends at the Boston Public Library and their Special Collections, and they came back and said, yeah, we have a box full of handwritten claims. Come on over. Take a look at them.

\[00:12:31.85\] So my team and I showed up with our cameras, and we photographed, in about a couple of hours, every single one of these documents. We barely had a chance to read them. That wasn't really the goal. It was just to get the information and get out, because it was November, and we wanted to go home for Thanksgiving, frankly.

\[00:12:46.91\] But then we farmed out the work to our volunteers and to the members of the public to actually go through and transcribe these things. What these are, are 339 handwritten claims by residents in Charlestown who had to flee both in April, which was when the British troops who were fleeing from Lexington and Concord, arrived back into Charlestown on their way back to Boston and wreaked havoc in Charlestown, early.

\[00:13:16.35\] That was something that very few of us actually knew that that had happened in Charlestown, that these claims actually revealed. But also, it recorded all the stuff that they had left behind in their homes, because there were no standing houses at the end of the war. Everything that they left behind was gone.

\[00:13:32.83\] And so we weren't able to go through and do a complete research on all of these documents, as far as what was left behind. But out there, we now have a transcription of all of these documents. This is a dissertation waiting to happen. This is a look at when you have an entire town's worth of people who have to run out the door. What do they choose to keep and what do they leave behind?

\[00:13:53.75\] It's also a little bit of a cheat sheet for archaeology, because if we dig up their sites, this is what's in the ground from that day, the stuff that they left behind. Now admittedly, sometimes they're like, and the little things that we left behind, which is where most of archaeology lives and plays, that little stuff that nobody really mentions. But it's also filling in the gaps of the archaeological record.

\[00:14:13.79\] If there are any archaeologists in here today, which I can tell there are many, how many times have we found chairs, box irons, a jack and spit? Like, these things do not end up in the archaeological record, but they are part of these houses, and they tell us a lot about these folks.

\[00:14:30.15\] So in many cases, these documents are missing pieces of our archaeological story that we can go back and do a documentary archaeology on, the material culture of what people left behind in Charlestown, and then compare that to what we know people have and things like inventories when they die, where everything is more or less intact and compare what people value when they think everything's going to be missing.

\[00:14:55.83\] Just another side story. There's a great exhibit at the Mass Historical Society, where one of the folks that were in-- I forget her name, unfortunately. One of the people that they have collections from is a woman who was in Charlestown on the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill. She was one of the 100 or 200 or so people that stayed behind. When the cannons started to fire and the town was burning, she grabbed her two spoons and ran out the door. And if you go to the exhibit, you'll see the two spoons on exhibit.

\[00:15:25.31\] We have her claim. And when we found out that there were these two spoons, we went through the claim. And in her claim, she claims for four knives, four forks, and two spoons, because the other two were at the Mass Historical Society. So they're just really interesting pieces of the puzzle. We told them. We got really excited. We're like, Mass Historical Society, look at these two spoons! They're like, cool. And that was it.

\[00:15:47.00\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:15:47.74\] So I thought it was pretty fun and exciting. But we'll come back to some claims. So that's a piece of the puzzle that's out there. We're not going to go through the claims tonight. We're going to talk about a couple. These are all big pieces of data that are available. All of this is online. You're going to get links to all of this, both during the presentation and at the end, when I have the Q&A thing up. So if you want to browse these things, they're all available online, for free.

\[00:16:11.02\] The other thing that we did was, we realized we had all of the information necessary to recreate a census of Charlestown on June 17, 1775, so we did. So we have 421 families, 1,390 residents, 38 Black residents. And this is an account of who they were, maiden names for women, if we know them, their age on that day-- so some folks were just born, so we have an age of eight days-- what they did for work, how many people were in their household, inclusive of enslaved people, their relationship, the whole nine yards.

\[00:16:47.74\] And this told us that we had both enslaved people and free people of color in Charlestown. We had multiple Indigenous people that were living in Charlestown. Unfortunately, most of those people were renters. And so even though we knew who they were and what they did and some of the information from their claims, we were missing the part of the puzzle, which is, who did they rent from? So we couldn't place them in the town. We know they're there. We just don't know where exactly.

\[00:17:14.94\] Couple that with some of the folks that were some of the wealthier families that had enslaved people. We really wanted to do archaeology on those households, because those are some people that we just don't know much about. We weren't able to get permissions to do any archaeology on the sites of enslavement, but those sites are still out there. We've identified them via map. We're going to be keeping our eyes on them. So if anything ever happens there, we can swoop in and do some archaeology, hopefully. But this is an actual inventory of all the residents.

\[00:17:40.14\] And then the craziest thing that we did, which I still can't believe we tried to do this, but in December of 2024, we started a process of doing the deed research for everybody in Charlestown on June 17. And the reason why we wanted to do that was because we had the census. We had the claims documents. We needed to know where people lived in order to do archaeology on their household. We weren't just going to dig randomly.

\[00:18:05.62\] But in order to figure out where people lived, we to figure out where everyone lived, because it was all kind of a puzzle. So we went through and, over the course of almost a year and a half, did deed research in our free time to map out everybody in Charlestown. Each of these properties-- this is all GIS based. That's a link to the GIS thing.

\[00:18:24.44\] You can click on any one of those properties and read who owns the property, what their household was like, what their claim was. You can go directly to the claim document. But what I thought was really helpful to show here-- we did a color coding to give a basic idea of the layout of the town. The colors are a little bit similar looking here, and I realized I did a very unfriendly color thing for folks with color blindness, and my apologies.

\[00:18:50.26\] But essentially, what this shows is that the concentration of properties with houses is entirely in the southern tip of Charleston. And as you leave that center core, you immediately get to rural spaces, and it's essentially farmland from there on out, which means that during the battle, which was in the middle of the Peninsula, they were entirely in an open space, only separated by fences and stone walls.

\[00:19:16.14\] The fire that took out the town was a physically separate area, on the southern part of the town, and that also concentrated the flames from house to house, so that, more or less, the town could burn down all at once.

\[00:19:30.34\] Just a quick zoom-in version, just to show you what these are. You can go to the actual deed page and read the deed for the property, what the description is, who's in that household. And then further down in that link, you get the link to their claim. So anything you want to know about that person-- and if you live in Charleston, you can find out exactly who lived on your property, June 17.

\[00:19:49.62\] The other thing that we were able to do is then place the major landmarks of the battle itself onto this map. Because remember, these are just folks with homes and businesses and fields, and their fields turned into a battlefield. So Liz Lemmen, up on the northern part, who became the proud owner one of the more important parts of the American Revolution, and her neighbor, Isaac Foster, had no idea that their fields in the back of Charlestown were going to suddenly become a major part of the war.

\[00:20:22.42\] So just to go over the landscape, we have the redoubt, which is square shaped, at the southern part of this map, but really, the center of town. We have the breastwork, extending north. We have the fleches, going to the northwest. I had to look up that word, how to pronounce it. Those are essentially V-shaped protective fences that would have had a cannon behind them. And so the V was really to protect the people at the cannon, more than anything.

\[00:20:47.10\] And the reason why they were placed there was to help prevent troops that were landing on Moulton's Point from walking down Bunker Hill Street and going to the neck and essentially going behind the rebels.

\[00:21:00.54\] Do we know, were they effective?

\[00:21:02.06\] The biggest issue here was that the British, when they landed, didn't really approach the fleches. They went to the rail fence and they went to the redoubt. I think they were effective in the sense that they weren't used that much. So maybe, in some ways, yes. But we know that the deaths that happened were really evenly divided between the rail fence and the redoubt. But that was also where the two halves of the American troops split between those two areas.

\[00:21:28.42\] All of this was fortified overnight. And we're going to refer back to a lot of these landmarks. I wanted to give you a layout of the land here and also introduce some of the landholders in this area. We have Samuel Swan, the proud owner of the redoubt and breastwork, Richard Boylston, who's one of the biggest landowners in Charlestown. Liz Lemmen, who I have to call "Liz Lemon" because I'm a huge 30 Rock fan, and Isaac Foster. And those are our main players in the game.

\[00:21:57.58\] This is the combination of archaeological data and historical data that we found out while trying to get ready to do archaeology. We're like, wow, this whole history thing is pretty interesting. You can learn a lot just from reading stuff. You don't have to dig up everything. So this is one of the things that actually was evolving as of today.

\[00:22:13.46\] So I'm not going to go into a whole bunch of names and a whole bunch of dates. You're going to see a couple of slides with text, but I just want to back some things up.

\[00:22:20.34\] One of the biggest accepted narratives of the Battle of Bunker Hill is that they called it the wrong thing. It was supposed to be the Battle of Bunker Hill. They fortified the wrong hill. They did the battle. And despite fortifying Breed's Hill, which is the hill in the middle, they were supposed to do Bunker's Hill in the northwest corner. It got named the Battle of Bunker Hill, and it's always been the wrong name ever since.

\[00:22:47.34\] Bunker Hill in the northwest-- the reason why they really wanted to fortify that one and not the middle one was that it would have prevented the British from essentially going to the neck and getting into Somerville, Medford, that area. The idea is that the Patriots, at night, when they got there, looked at it, and they looked down the road, and they're like, I can't even see the water from here. There's that other hill that's a little bit further up, i.e., Breed's Hill. If we go up there, it's a little bit more of a middle finger to the folks that are sleeping on those boats.

\[00:23:15.48\] And so the idea was that this was just a more antagonistic location. And the folks that built this thing said, let's go for it. And so they went up to Breed's Hill. They built the redoubt. It worked in the sense that it was very antagonistic. And they essentially started one of the-- if not one of the bloodiest battles in the American Revolution and got the entire town of Charlestown erased as a result of that.

\[00:23:40.62\] But was it a mistake or was it a deliberate antagonism? That's one of the big questions out there. I think it's actually misnamed. The current misnaming is actually incorrect as well. So here's what we've been looking at and finding as we go.

\[00:23:56.06\] So a wall of text. Sorry. But really quickly, immediately following the battle, we have a couple of references to people basically saying, why the heck was the redoubt on top of Breed's Hill in the first place?

\[00:24:08.82\] So we have William Prescott, who's one of the major generals in the whole thing, writing to John Adams. "I received orders to go to Bunker Hill. But before day, we began a fortification on the hill in Charlestown." Like, whoopsie daisy. That kind of thing. Israel Putnam, "The nearer height was preferred as it brought the works closer to Boston and the enemy." Otherwise, we really wanted to pick a fight.

\[00:24:30.78\] The other thing that we were noticing as we were going through deeds was the lack of any term using the word Breed's Hill. In fact, we were finding the opposite. While we were going through deeds, we were like, god, these keep talking about Bunker Hill. It's almost like the hill was misnamed even before the battle. But I don't even think that's quite right.

\[00:24:49.52\] So Jeremy Belknap, publishing in 1791, "The battle is improperly called that of Bunker's Hill, for the principal action was on Breed's Hill." When we look at the deeds, the term "Breed's Hill" doesn't even turn up in deeds until the 1790s anywhere. We don't actually see the existence of the term Breed's Hill in the records until years after the Revolution.

\[00:25:13.54\] And this I saw today, and I'm embarrassed by it, because I should have seen this in the claims. But I was looking up some information, because the Park Service emailed me asking me, are any of the claims saying Breed's Hill? And I'm like, no, I don't think so. But I just did a search for "hill." This one popped up.

\[00:25:27.46\] So this is Samuel Swan-- you can see his name in the very upper left-- writing a claim document, and he says, right in it-- I could read it on my screen. "A great part of it is pasture, where the fight was in June. And pasture on Bunker Hill or breastwork on it, in the ground, almost all cut up within the breastwork and part of the other pasture cut up." This is literally Samuel swan saying, the entire fortification, which was on my property, really messed up my field. And he puts in a claim at the end of it saying, I lost all my grass because they stomped all over it.

\[00:26:06.40\] But he's saying in this claim, not only, this is where my property is, which we got the deed right, but it's saying, also, in it, he's the guy who owns the dang thing and he's calling it Bunker's Hill. So we have 13 different claims in Charlestown referring to the battle-- these are residents of Charlestown-- as the Battle of Bunker Hill. We have residents who own the hill on which the Breed's Hill thing was, calling the Hill Bunker's Hill.

\[00:26:41.01\] It's all Bunker's Hill. I don't know why, because if you look at any map, there are two hills. But to the people of Charlestown, maybe they had depth perception issues, but there is apparently no experiential difference between Bunker Hill, i.e., later called Breed's Hill, and Bunker Hill, the hill on the western part. It was all Bunker's Hill.

\[00:27:04.59\] If you did a poll of the audience the day of the battle and said, where did that redoubt get built, the town residents of Charlestown would have said, Bunker's Hill. This is the Battle of Bunker's Hill. Everybody agreed at the moment. It was only immediately afterwards that everyone was like, wait a minute. And that misnamed idea came up and that stuck, ironically. The misnamed misname was the thing that stuck.

\[00:27:30.95\] Anyway, we're going to make the claim it was a battle of Bunker's Hill, it was accurately named. Breed's Hill was Bunker Hill. It only later got separated as two separate hills in the eyes of the people. And we're going to move on from there.

\[00:27:45.89\] The one thing that we haven't been able to decide or prove in any way with documents is whether or not the folks that got to the top of the hill-- when they were told to do Bunker's Hill, they knew that they were being told to do the western hill. That's a given, because they actually say, we were told to do Bunker's Hill. We did a different hill.

\[00:28:06.41\] But were they working within the idea that, well, the whole thing is Bunker's Hill, so we're not technically breaking the rules because we are fortifying Bunker Hill? We're just going to do the part that's a little bit more antagonistic. That we can't tell, if that was deliberate in the sense of, we're going to go against the orders because we know they meant the other hill, or if they're saying, we're going to play a little fast and loose with the interpretation of this hill.

\[00:28:28.03\] Because the person that doesn't actually understand that they refer to a much bigger hill than they think they did, when they gave the orders, doesn't realize that other hill, which we would like to do, is also Bunker's Hill. So we can't say one way or the other with that. But anyway, Breed's Hill didn't exist. Moving on.

\[00:28:44.09\] What we did have permission to dig last year-- and I'll talk a little bit about those digs. Spoiler alert, we didn't find a huge amount of stuff, so I'm going to go quickly to those. But one of the properties that we were able to excavate, which we were welcomed on by the First Church in Charlestown, was the property of John Hay. Ironically, John Hay owned a field, and it was mostly a field of grass and various things like that. He didn't give a lot of descriptions, but this was one of the properties that we were able to go out to do our very first dig.

\[00:29:14.21\] And one of the nice things about this was the fact that its mowing fields meant that we were going to be able to see, in areas where the ground would have burned during the battle but didn't necessarily have a lot of rubble associated with it, that signature of the fire.

\[00:29:28.69\] One of the things I call Charlestown is Boston's Pompeii, because when you get closer to the downtown areas, the places that are left untouched since 1775 have this complete disaster level, where everything's just gone or everything's destroyed, but it's still there. And we wanted to see what that would look slightly outside of the town.

\[00:29:47.27\] So we were able to do this dig on the back of the First Church, which you can see in the left image. And archaeology is one of those things where you show up on a site, you've done a ton of research of everybody that owns this property going back to the 1600s, and you can say what you want to find. I'd like to find 1775, please. The site does whatever it wants to do in return.

\[00:30:09.33\] So we showed up on this site and the next one and said, please show us the American Revolution. They said, here's some nice 19th century sights for you. And we're like, OK, cool, that's fine. So what we were able to find, actually, is this kind of large miniature race course that you see down in the lower part. And our opening trench hit the edges of it.

\[00:30:28.19\] And then everybody came out of the blue, walked up to us, and said, oh, yeah, that's the fountain. Like, good to know. Everybody knows about the site before we got here. It would have saved us a lot of digging and research. But we wanted to know, is that true? A test of legends. So fine.

\[00:30:41.87\] So we extended our trench across that oval area and continued digging. The area outside of the oval was really-- I think it was interesting. You tell me what you think. We found that field, that John Hay field that was there in the 1700s. And as we dug through it, it was this really nice black earth that had been heavily plowed.

\[00:31:05.69\] And as we got through the black earth and down into what we call the subsoil, which is typically a reddish brown-- we call it a B soil. It's got a lot of iron in it. We started to see all these stripes. And we were like, oh, this is really cool. It's a feature. It's some sort of walkway or structure or something. No, it's just the scars left behind by the plow, going across the field over and over again.

\[00:31:23.51\] So what you're seeing is the deepest time the plow scraped across the site, as we transition into the subsoils. And it's just a nice moment in time of farming in Charlestown. Because now, today, you go there, and it's these buildings. And it's pretty developed and rural. Not rural, domestic, but not rural by any means.

\[00:31:44.85\] As soon as we got into these soils as well, we started to find evidence of Native creations, flakes, stone tools, things like that, also in the site, because Charlestown was a pretty major village in the contact period especially, in the early 1600s.

\[00:31:58.61\] Once we got to the oval-shaped thing, the 1930s showed up. \[LAUGHS\] And so this is a feature that's probably a 19th century fountain, in actuality. We dug down. We found the middle of it. And in the floor is this lead pipe supported by brickwork. That would have been the spigot that comes up.

\[00:32:20.89\] This property was actually part of a large garden estate in the early 1800s, after the Revolution. It was one of the largest properties owned soon after the battle, when the town rebuilt itself. It took a long time to come back, but there were some large estates in the central part of the city.

\[00:32:37.17\] The fountain would have been around until about 1930 or so and then pretty rapidly filled in with all the garbage of Charlestown, as well as a lot of pieces of the church itself. So the church had a fire, and they lost a lot of their roof and some of the walls, and that all went into the hole as well. In addition, to it, all of the household waste and bottles and things that people threw out behind--

\[00:33:00.23\] And one of the funnest things that we found-- again, we're not going to make it to the archaeology magazine for this one in particular, but a 1924 Hood milk bottle, which is actually one of the local companies to Charlestown. And that's Jennifer Reed, our long-term volunteer who's from Charlestown. It made her day. So that was just a fun thing to find.

\[00:33:22.17\] We're not saving the world with this site, but it was a really interesting snapshot of 20th century archaeology in Charlestown. Unfortunately, beyond a really nice farm feature from probably the 1600s, 1700s and a really cool deposit of trash from the 1930s, the 1700s were plowed in and just didn't really show up very much. So we said thank you very much to the site, and we moved down the street, to James Trumbull's property.

\[00:33:46.77\] This was a really exciting property because there was a house and a lot of outbuildings. The issue was that it's a 2-acre property. So anything that we know that's on this property is spread out across 2 acres, and that includes a rum distillery, a tannery, the house, the barn. So that's a lot of stuff and a lot of space to put it in.

\[00:34:04.05\] For anybody that knows anything about tanning, you bet that tanning facility was on the opposite end of the property from the house, because it smells terrible. And we were digging right in the smack middle of the property, so we really didn't know what we were going to get.

\[00:34:18.93\] The way we did our research for this particular property, besides knowing that it was a Trumball property-- first of all, we put out a social media post that said, hey, do you hate your garden? Do you really want to dig up your stuff? Call us. And we got some interest from folks.

\[00:34:33.21\] This was one of the properties that we got somebody offering their yard, and we wanted to dig it. And so we were able to find out their property on Monument Square-- it's this red backyard area. We also, on a lot of these properties, would go through all the more recent atlases to see what's happened on the property since, because we're not going to dig on a site that, in 1950, got a full foundation of a basement of a house or another building and destroyed the site, and now we're digging through 6 feet of trash or 6 feet of brick or something like that. Old trash is fun. 1960s trash, less excited about. And it's filled with asbestos half the time, too, and we don't do that.

\[00:35:12.41\] So anyway, this was a site that we were able to say, OK, there's nothing destroying the site, at least, in the 19th century, which is kind of rare. So let's go. So we were able to carefully put our units inside this person's backyard. And we had their kids watching us the whole time, who maybe skipped a couple of days of school. And it was really an exciting dig. It was an interesting dig, I should say.

\[00:35:35.57\] The exciting part was, on the very first day, we found this amazing-- OK, it looks amazing to me, I promise. You can kind of see this angle of tan-colored soil, and it turns right and goes down. There's a right angle there. What we do when we approach our sites is we deliberately put our trenches.

\[00:35:53.41\] When we're first going to a site, when we've never dug before, we put our trenches on angles to the site. And that way, when we dig and we're looking for things like walls or anything that could tell us where we are, if there's something there, what we don't want to do is lay our trenches on the same grid of the street or the houses that are there, because we could end up digging 2 inches from a wall for 100 feet and never see the wall.

\[00:36:14.37\] On an angle, we can hit everything, and we're just crashing through the site archaeologically, because we just want to see where things are. And these are quick samples. Is this worth digging further or not? So even though it was on an angle, that's actually a good thing, to find these right angles at 45 degrees, because that's what we should be seeing.

\[00:36:32.97\] That's clay. And when you find the right a right angle made of clay, it's almost always an outhouse. So we got really, really excited. So what we thought this was the outside corner of a privy. What people would do was in order to make their privies watertight, when they were building these kind of small boxes in the ground-- they're kind of built like small foundations, but they would build those stone foundations or the brick or wood foundation, and they would line the outside of it with clay.

\[00:37:00.89\] And the goal was to actually make it watertight, so that the contents that went into the Privy would not seep into their water system, because a lot of these folks had a well on their same property. They didn't know a lot about bacteria and things, but they knew if their wells smelled like their privy, something was wrong. So they would line their privies with clay.

\[00:37:18.46\] So finding this right angle of clay was extremely exciting. We got all ready. We turned it into a feature which is 10 times more paperwork. And then we started to dig through it, and within an inch, it disappeared. We never saw anything like it again. So we're not quite sure what it is. It might have been a small path for a garden or something like that, but it wasn't the privy that we had all hoped it would be.

\[00:37:39.12\] And then we went down 4 feet, which is how deep we can go safely without making a much bigger hole. And by the time we got to the bottom of it, we had found probably 15 or so different layers of deposits and thousands of oyster shells and nothing from before 1820 or so. The 1700s just did not come out and play on this site, unfortunately.

\[00:38:05.38\] It's hard to date the oyster shells. So oyster shells typically, on this scale, is an industrial factory canning operation. However, this is not where we think the oyster shells would have been placed originally. A lot of folks are reusing oyster shells as a paving material.

\[00:38:24.62\] So if you go out to Boston Common-- I was just in there for the protests-- and you're walking along the pathways, if you look at the base of trees, the trees are actually pulling stuff out of the ground as the ground gets churned up a little bit around them. There's oyster shells all over the common, because that's where the pathways used to be. Well, not what used to be.

\[00:38:40.50\] All the pathways that you see today used to be oyster shell paths. And so as you're walking along the Common and you see the trees of the oyster shell around them, that's the shell that's getting pulled out of the paths that are underneath the newer paths.

\[00:38:52.00\] So what I think is happening is that these are being used to essentially pave the site. Charlestown in general has a ton of clay. It's one of the reasons why Tufts exists and why Cambridge exists, is that the clay-- you can make bricks from. Bricks are cheap, but when you make a million of them, you can get fairly wealthy off of them. This site has a lot of clay in it.

\[00:39:12.60\] If you got a rain on a nice slope of Breed's Hill, Bunker's Hill, whatever you want to call it, it becomes a slip and slide. And so a lot of the times, these sites will have some sort of paving material, just to stop everybody from falling. So in the 19th century, there were a bunch of industries around this yard. We don't quite know what each of those industries were, but my guess is that a lot of the clam shells and the oyster shells were being used essentially to protect themselves from sliding all over their site.

\[00:39:39.48\] You can see a really big pocket of Oyster shells on the lower left. There were some stones at the bottom of it that looked like it may have been a footing for some part of an outbuilding, maybe a post that would have held up part of a building. Nothing super exciting. And then all of those stones were sitting directly on subsoil.

\[00:39:54.54\] So our interpretation of this site is that after the Revolution and the fires from the Revolution, you had a denuded landscape. There were no grasses. The trees had been more or less lost. There were tons of claims for the trees. This would have been erosion central.

\[00:40:09.78\] And so I think what happened was on some of the steeper sloped areas, the site just washed off the top of it. And so I think we lost a lot of our sites in Charlestown, in the outer parts of the town, because what we see is the 19th century being built directly on top of ground that has no surface soils whatsoever. So it looks like everything washed off. They built right on top of subsoil.

\[00:40:33.72\] We did find a couple of cool things, a 1920s perfume bottle lid, a really cool toy ax that was made mostly of lead, because children love lead.

\[00:40:42.74\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:40:43.44\] And other fun things from the 19th century, but actually, really not any artifacts from the earlier time period. So this site was another one that we said, thank you very much to this site and to the property owners. And we said, we're not going to keep digging this one. It's a cool 19th century site. We'll come back someday if we want to look at that. But for what we're doing, we'll move on to another site.

\[00:41:03.00\] Now we're going to go back to the stuff we're working on this year. One of the big questions that is out there for Charlestown is, where are all the dead people? 226 people died during the Battle of Bunker Hill. We currently have about six people, seven people that we know whose bodies were found and where they are, and that's it. So we're still missing about 220 people somewhere in Charlestown. And they're mapped, as to where they've been found over time.

\[00:41:34.08\] A really important part of the project. Sarah Kiley Schoff is our forensic anthropologist. When you have 226 dead people hiding somewhere in your town, you have a forensic anthropologist on your project so that when you find a bone, it goes straight to the forensic anthropologist. And even when you can very obviously see it's a cow leg, you definitely make sure.

\[00:41:51.16\] But anyway, Sarah Kiley Schoff is a forensic anthropologist. She who works at Tufts. And she's our bones person. So we verify every bone that we find for that reason.

\[00:42:02.12\] One of the surveys that's going to happen in the next couple of weeks, actually-- Bob, our GPR guy, is going to come back up. We're going to be doing a survey at the Bunker Hill Burying Ground, which is kind of on Liz Lemmen's backyard. On the map on the left is the Bunker Hill Burying Ground. The eastern part of that property follows the property line on the rail fence. So where it goes from trees to houses, that was the fence line that was fortified. Not fortified. It really just covered in grass, fortified. The American side, on one side, shot the British on the other side. About 120 people died here. This was actually the area where the most people died.

\[00:42:42.60\] After the war, this field sold and became an almshouse. And then, it later was sold again and became a cemetery. And one of our interpretations is that this field-- and there's nothing else around this area that would have been good for an almshouse. It's just the middle of nowhere.

\[00:43:01.84\] So our interpretation is that following the battle, this land was dead. You could not use it for farming anymore. And one of the reasons why we think-- metaphorically dead, in the minds of people. And one of our ideas is that this would have been one of the places where the dead were buried, because it became an almshouse, and almshouses often have cemeteries with them. We think a few people from the almshouse would have been buried, but then later, it was sold as a cemetery.

\[00:43:27.38\] So there's a reason that that happens on this property, and we think it's because in the memory of the residents, this was a place of burials. This was a place that is no longer good for growing things. But that never got written down, unfortunately, that we've been able to find. So we're going to do a ground-penetrating radar survey across the cemetery and look out for a large mass burial pit.

\[00:43:49.58\] We have a couple of historic documents that talk about mass burial pits. We can't necessarily trust all of them because they said a whole lot of stuff that we know isn't true. But at least a couple of folks said that there was a large pit where the bodies were placed. We don't know where, but this could have been one of those spots.

\[00:44:03.08\] What I'm showing on the right is an example. We haven't done the survey yet, so this is not Boston, but it's an example of how cemeteries can look in the ground. So what we're expecting to see in the cemetery is a nice grid of grave shafts. This is one of those cemeteries that weren't rearranged a lot, so everything should still be, more or less, the way it was laid out. So it's going to look almost like a DNA test that you see in those little gel things of these rectangles.

\[00:44:26.24\] However, within that, we're expecting to see a big rectangle that looks different from these smaller rectangles. And then, around that, should be undisturbed or at least plowed Charlestown. If we find that large rectangle, we're going to assume that that's a mass burial. We're not going to dig there.

\[00:44:43.88\] But one of the questions is, where are the 120 people buried? If we find an evidence of a mass burial pit, that's going to be our best guess for the folks that died at the rail fence. So we'll see how that goes.

\[00:44:55.43\] Who had possession of the bodies right after the battle? Who had control of the--

\[00:44:59.08\] The British were there for until Evacuation Day. They were immediately burying people within 24 hours to 48 hours, so they buried the dead. We don't know if they did separate burials for the British and the Americans. We don't know if they separated people by race. We have no idea how they went in the ground. We know they buried them. That's all we know. So we'll see, hopefully, in this area, some evidence of that burial practice.

\[00:45:22.40\] The other area that we're looking at is down by the fleches. Closer to the transition to the breastwork, there was what's called the northern declivity, which is just a big scoop of Earth that the glacier carved out, and the river later helped. The Mystic helped carve it out.

\[00:45:39.16\] An idea is that the reason why we're finding these bodies 15, 16 feet down in that area is that that was a low-lying area that people were buried en mass and then was filled in, in order to make the hill a little less steep. And when people were putting wells in, they were actually finding bodies with military buttons on them. So we think that's another mass burial area.

\[00:46:00.26\] And when Bob comes back, we're doing a survey with a much more powerful machine that goes much deeper down Concord Street. And we hope to see that scoop of earth, where the declivity is. We're not going to be able to see a burial pit. We just want to be able to prove that that pit could be in that kind of slump by showing it on the map. But otherwise, we're never going to really know, because we're not digging people up at the site whatsoever.

\[00:46:23.58\] We're going to actively avoid people, if we can. And one of those major reasons is that the one fallen native soldier fell at the rail fence, from the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe. And he's there somewhere. So for that reason alone, we're not touching the ground around burials ever. But we'd like to be able to at least tell the 100 or so, 200 or so people, who are descendants of the people that fell.

\[00:46:51.59\] If you want to go and commemorate someone that fell, here's two places to go and have that time. There is no marker for the deceased anywhere in Charlestown. There are markers that talk about people, but there's nothing that says, here was the place where these people are buried. There's a marker for the rail fence but not for the burials that are likely there. We're hoping to change that. So the radar is our big thing that we're doing this summer.

\[00:47:19.35\] So just real quick, how this thing was done. It was done in the dead of night. There was a decent moon, but not a full moon. It's called a ditch and bank or ditch and parapet. It's not the most well-built thing in the world. Basically, you dig a trench. And all the contents of that trench you pile up next to the trench, and that trench becomes your parapet. And when you're done, you have essentially, in this case, a 130-foot-square-ish box that you're standing inside of with a trench all the way around it. And then you get attacked by the British, in this case.

\[00:47:52.17\] So the parapet itself is gone. If it was there, we would see it still today. It would be sticking up. What we're hoping is to find that dirt that was dug up and then filled back in and is now less dense than the natural soils around it, under the ground. And one of the ways we do that is to do ground-penetrating radar.

\[00:48:11.35\] So this is Bob Chartrand and his GPR machine. He did one last summer. I'll show you some of those results. He's coming back this summer to do an even stronger, more powerful scan.

\[00:48:26.71\] We did not discover this by any means, but this is something that I think needs to be more widely known, because nobody's really talking about this one. This is a map of the redoubt site that has been in books for hundreds of years and has gone fairly unnoticed.

\[00:48:41.95\] So Henry Pelham, who is a cartographer, wrote to John Singleton Copley. There's a whole book of his letters. You can download it online. I got this off of the web. It's out there. It's just not really looked at. He went to the site of the battle the day after the battle and was actually asked to take records. And ultimately, he did a map of all of the forts around Boston, but he actually gives us a scale of 90 yards.

\[00:49:07.97\] He draws the shape of the fort. He even puts in the burial site of Dr. Warren, who was one of the more famous people that actually fell during the battle. I think this is probably the most realistic or reliable map of the redoubt that exists, because he's a mapmaker who saw it himself. So we're going to really lean on this map going forward.

\[00:49:31.79\] There's also a pathway that goes off to the rail fence, and he even draws the rail fence in the back. I don't really understand the other fence at all, at this point. Maybe one day we will, but I don't fully know that. But we have the rail fence, the breastwork, and the redoubt all drawn on this map.

\[00:49:48.37\] So this is the result of the GPR. We've never shown this before, so I just got permission for this today. That's why you see all these funny little acronyms around. It means, basically, don't take this. So what we're seeing here is a slice-by-slice image of the GPR results as we go down through the property. I'm going to try to do this with a touchpad.

\[00:50:11.71\] So what you're seeing in that grid shape around it is actually the watering lines of the hill. It's just the grass-growing system. And then you see a pathway coming up from the corner, an old path, more pathways, more utility lines, an old X, which was the original path structure, overall. This is a slightly deeper-- we're now almost 2 feet down.

\[00:50:42.15\] All the utilities. We're now 2.5 down. You can see the water line that goes up to the museum, and things start disappearing overall, which is good. And then other things start to appear. So we're going to stop right there.

\[00:50:59.35\] So all that we have now is, we're down 3.5 feet. There's this kind of V-shaped thing on the bottom left, and then there's a bunch of other things. And I'll get to the other things. I think the V-shaped thing on the bottom left is a utility that went to a fountain that-- somebody, for some reason, put a fountain right there.

\[00:51:16.23\] But those kind of blobs and some of the angular lines is what's really getting us excited about the potential for the trenches around the redoubt surviving. So I'm going to go to the next screen, just because you can see the things a little bit better. So what we did is, we took that Pelham map and overlaid it on top of those lines, and we had to stretch it a little bit. It's obviously not square in this image.

\[00:51:37.89\] But what we think we're seeing is three of the corners of the redoubt. And the part that really got us like, that's it, that has to be it, is that southern-- so on the southern of the two red rectangles, there's a real distinct, obtuse angle there that has no reason to exist underground, 3 feet down. However, if you overlay everything where we think things should be with the Pelham map, there is an angle that kind of lines up with that for one of the bastions on the outside of the fort.

\[00:52:09.51\] So what we're going to do this summer is, we're going to start by digging those two trenches right where we show them there, and try to cross-section that trench and see if we can actually document if the things inside that feature, 3 feet down, are from the mid to late 1700s. That should be really easy to do.

\[00:52:24.87\] And then we're going to chase it in different directions. We have 18 square meters to play with. It's high stakes archaeology out there. But the other part that I'm really excited about is that those corners seem to look consistent on those three sides. The fourth one, I think, doesn't exist at all, because the hill was actually flattened at one point, in order to build the monument.

\[00:52:44.69\] So my interpretation is that we're missing the southeast one, because that was the part of the Hill that was just slightly higher as it went up to the crest. And so when they flattened the hill, that's the part that actually got relatively cut down further, including cutting through that corner. I'm also just making all the data match my idea, so we'll see.

\[00:53:01.61\] \[LAUGHTER\]

\[00:53:02.55\] That's why we ground truth. So come out this June. June 8, we're going to start digging. We have two weeks to do this project. We're going to be out there every day, so come out and see the trenches, see the results. Look at the actual redoubt. We're going to try to see if we can get people down into it, to be able to stand at the redoubt, because I think that would be really important. And it will be open on the 251st anniversary of the actual Battle of Bunker Hill.

\[00:53:26.83\] And we're doing the project with a team of Wounded Warriors who are now recovering, using archaeology training as part of their recovery service for PTSD, so it's a really great project. We're really excited about it. A whole lot of money to do it, and it's a well-funded project, so we're really excited about it. So please come out and see it this June.

\[00:53:45.73\] The other thing that I thought was really cool is that the property lines create a square on top of the hill, and that just made me very happy. And it's almost exactly 130 feet square. And I'm like, so they picked the fence lines of an existing field and said, hey, we don't even have to measure this thing out. We'll just dig a trench around a fence, cover the fence with dirt as a redoubt. And we'll see.

\[00:54:12.31\] And there's a really interesting little road that goes right up to it that turned up in the deeds. And then we, afterwards, found it on maps. It was there all along. We just never noticed it.

\[00:54:22.13\] This is the last thing I'm going to talk about. So jumping to Roxbury, this fall, we're going to do a project that may or may not go into next year. We'll see if we get a federal grant. We'll see if we get it. But for those of you that are familiar with the Roxbury area or funny-looking architecture, this is the Roxbury Standpipe, which is done in a fairytale style. It's literally called fairytale style.

\[00:54:47.91\] So it's a standpipe to create water pressure in the town. It was put there in the 1860s. It's sitting in the middle of a Revolutionary War Fort. They did that really cool thing, though, where they saw the fort, and they're like, this is a nice, high spot to put this standpipe. But the fort's in the way, so we'll just dig the fort off the top of the hill, put the standpipe.

\[00:55:07.27\] And then later, they were like, but we really like the fort. So they put the fort back, they just with dirt. And then an idiot archaeologist is getting really excited and starts getting the Parks Department to agree with us to have a dig up on there. And fortunately, I found the record that said, by the way, that's not really the real fort, because we would have looked like morons digging through that for a couple of weeks and finding stuff from the 1960s.

\[00:55:31.27\] So this is part of our project area. We're going to be looking at this, but this is not where we're going to dig. I'm just giving you the scene. We zoom out before we zoom in.

\[00:55:40.75\] During the Siege of Boston-- the reason why it's the siege is because the British landed in Boston, and they went off to Lexington and Concord. They got chased back to Boston. And then the militias around Boston laid siege on Boston, on themselves, essentially. So that meant is that they were holding the British troops in the city, so that they didn't come out and try to kill everyone again.

\[00:56:00.93\] So what Washington ordered, following the Battle of Bunker Hill, was essentially a ring of forts, all the way around the town of Boston. So what this map is showing in pink is all those different, little forts that go all the way around it. And these are really there to stop British troops on foot, on water, by air, maybe, even. If they try to do anything, someone's going to notice and try to shoot them.

\[00:56:22.87\] The British also had, at the southern part of the neck of Boston, as it goes into Roxbury, their own fortifications to stop the American troops that were piled up outside of Boston from getting in there and messing up their good time. And so we're going to zoom in on Roxbury down here.

\[00:56:37.95\] So at the very southern end, at the bottom of the image, is the Roxbury High Fort, which is a star fort, a four-sided star fort, basically a gigantic, well-designed version of the redoubt in Charlestown. Just to the north of it, though, is called Roxbury Lower Fort, and it's a fort that is as important, if not more important than the high fort, and nobody knows about it.

\[00:56:59.03\] It's 2 acres in size. It's a legit fort. And you can see it in topographic maps. So if we look at the LiDAR scans, which are basically laser scans of the Earth, with the buildings taken off, you can see the road coming out of Boston. It splits at Dudley and Nubian Square. And then these are the historic roads that lead out of Dudley.

\[00:57:20.51\] So if you were going to leave the town of Boston, you didn't have a lot of choices as to how you would go. It was really these five roads. Most people would have gone to the west, because that gets you to be able to go around to Cambridge, if you take the long way. Or you can go west and south from there, which is the route that Knox took on his way into Boston.

\[00:57:41.90\] So on the southern part is the star fort for the High Fort. And the lower fort is built on top of a natural puddingstone outcrop. And you can just see the star shape down on the southern one. So that 2-acre fort is what we're going to be interested in this fall.

\[00:58:02.70\] So on the left is the LiDAR. There is one drawing known of this fort. That's all we really know about it. We know, approximately, its measurements, but that's it. Somebody drew, on a powder horn, which is the horns that you put black powder in-- somebody drew the fort on a powder horn. I can't find this powder horn. So if anybody knows of a powder horn out there that says Roxbury Fort on it, let me know about it, because it is MIA, and I very much would like to see it in person, to see if there are other parts of this drawing on it.

\[00:58:32.30\] But when you overlay that map on the natural outcrop, you can see that some of the rock undulations really echo the shape of the otherwise bizarrely shaped fort. And even some of the ability to get up into the fort with some of the doorways and stuff are pretty well indicated. And then, on the far right, what you can see is what it looks like today. About half of the fort is currently open space.

\[00:58:57.82\] It was owned by the city of Boston, most of it. And then they sold it really recently to a gardening organization. But I just spoke with them last week, and they're excited about this project. And so we're hoping that this fall-- not hoping. At this point, it's all about happening.

\[00:59:11.10\] This fall, we're going to go out to this area, onto these open spaces, to see if we can find anything to do with this fort. What we really want to start with is looking for the edges, that hill that would have gone up at first, just to fortify it. Unfortunately-- rich people, I'm telling you. There's a guy that had a really big house in the southeast corner. It's called the-- oh, no. I've gone blank. It's been a long day, y'all.

\[00:59:37.30\] It's a big house. And he had a back window, and he complained about the fact that in the evening, the sun dipped behind the fort and blocked his ability to have more sunlight. So he got his folks to just dig away the fort behind him. So I think the southeast corner is a little bit blitzed, but somebody said that he dug away the whole fort. And I'm like, it's 2 acres. He didn't take away 2 acres of little mounds to be able to see out the back window. So I suspect that there are other pieces of this little ridge around.

\[01:00:07.02\] And then obviously, the drawing itself shows three structures. I don't know what those are necessarily, but there should be a gun house, which is where they stored their guns, a powder house, which is where they stored their powder, and an outhouse, which is where they stored their outs.

\[01:00:21.34\] But the powder house should be the one that's the most visible, because the way you build a powder house is, you sink them in the ground a little bit. And that's basically so that if they ever blow up, it doesn't go out, it goes up. And so you sink them in the ground, so that it doesn't have a place to go outward. And then you put the roof on just like-- and then walk away. That's how they put the roof on it. So when it blows, it doesn't become a pipe bomb. The roof is just sitting on top of it. It's not attached, so it goes shooting up into the air. Anyway, it's a cool visual, but we're not going to find the roof.

\[01:00:55.78\] I would like to find the foot for that powder house somewhere in the landscape, if possible. I don't know if anybody knows how to tell the difference between three otherwise similar-looking triangles on rectangles, as to what structures I'm looking at there. But you also see some of the guns. Some of those would have been, potentially, the Knox cannons and then pikes, because I mean, why not, all the way around the outside of it, pointing outwards. But to be honest, it's the puddingstone that would have stopped people from getting up to the top.

\[01:01:29.22\] OK, we made it. That's what we're going to do this year. That's what we've been doing for the past couple of years. It's the 250th. We're excited that it's happening. We're kind of excited that it's almost done. And we've got a whole lot more projects coming up, both this year and down the road. We're going to be digging next week, in Mattapan, for a completely different site. We've got four digs this summer.

\[01:01:49.62\] We've got an outhouse in JP. We've got a native site in Mattapan. We've got an 18th century school in Dorchester and the redoubt, obviously, and then whatever else comes up between now and then.

\[01:02:02.94\] I don't remember where that goes, so that probably is useful to you. I made this slide a long time ago. Hopefully it's useful still. And I'm going to stop there for questions, even though we've gone a little over time. But thank you all for sticking around this long.

\[01:02:15.40\] \[APPLAUSE\]



 



 

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