by Archaeologists working on a historic Gettysburg battlefield recently made an explosive discovery: a live 160-year-old artillery shell that had to be detonated by a specially trained US defense team.
The shell was found on 8 February at Small round top (opens in a new tab), a hill that gave Union forces a strategic position during the Civil War. On July 2, 1863, the second day of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, the North and South fought for 90 minutes to control Little Round Top, leaving thousands of soldiers dead. However, the rocky ground was not an ideal platform for an artillery offensive, as Confederate General Robert E. Lee suggested in his 1864 report (opens in a new tab) on the Gettysburg Campaign. Lee reported that Confederate General Longstreet was being delayed by Union forces firing from Little Round Top, but Longstreet decided to go around them instead of trying to take the hill.
An 18-month rehabilitation project is currently underway at Little Round Top as the National Park Service works to preserve and protect the battlefield landscape and add new signage for Gettysburg visitors. Archaeologist Steven Brann and his team from Stantec, a consultancy that also carries out archaeological work, were sweeping the area with metal detectors when they hit something almost 0.6 meters underground. “It is standard procedure to use metal detectors on battlefields,” Stantec spokesperson Trevor Eckart said in an email to Live Science.
The unexploded round they discovered was about 18 centimeters long and weighed about 4.5 kilograms. “There are procedures in place in case such items are found,” Eckart explained. Finally, the Army’s 55th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company (EOD) from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was called in to remove the grenade and destroy it safely.
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“Unexploded ordnance still found on the battlefield is a pretty unique circumstance,” Jason Martz, a Gettysburg National Military Park spokesperson, told LiveScience in an email. “It is only the fifth found since 1980.”
“Most of the items we find are much smaller, such as baseball caps, bullets and uniform buttons,” Eckart said. “Much of what we find turns out to be modern rubbish or objects that were discarded during the construction of monuments, such as iron straps and nails.” Yet these objects are usually not discovered unless excavation takes place. And as the current discovery shows, excavation on a battlefield can be dangerous. “Archaeological work is always completed before any ground disturbance takes place, and it is a federal offense to dig or metal detect for these artifacts by the public,” Martz said.
Many commentators and history buffs at Gettysburg National Military Park Facebook posts (opens in a new tab) lamented the fact that the ammunition – as Captain Matthew Booker, head of EOD, identified (opens in a new tab) as 3-inch Dyer or Burton shell (opens in a new tab) for one rifled cannon (opens in a new tab) – had to be destroyed.
Still, “this particular shell hasn’t told us the whole story yet,” Martz said. The park is researching the shell and its find location in greater detail now, trying to determine, for example, whether it was fired by Union or Confederate troops, and will release that information to the public when it is available.
“The fact that this shell was found almost 160 years after the Battle of Gettysburg is a very powerful and tangible connection to the past,” Martz added. “It also reminds us that the battlefield still has stories to tell.”
