City of Boston Archaeology Program

06/03/2026

Nice coverage of our dig at Bunker Hill from yesterday! We’re full up on volunteers, but come by and say hi!

Archaeologists and veterans are digging at Bunker Hill for clues fr...

06/02/2026

Our first (almost certainly) Revolutionary War artifact has turned up in a historic fill level! This unused or barely used D-shaped gunflint was made from grey English flint. It is a “spall” type which means it was made from a primary flake knocked directly off of a flint nodule, and not made from a pre-prepared flint core.

06/02/2026

Cool artifact alert! What do you all think? Key to the old Bunker Hill museum? Let us know your best guess in the comments! 🗝️

06/02/2026

We’re back at it today! AVAR and Friends of Boston Archaeology are with us so come say hello and see some archaeology in action! We are working our way down to historic ground surface in our search for the remains of the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill redoubt.

06/01/2026

Day 1 at Bunker Hill begins! We’re collaborating with the , , and AVAR - American Veterans Archaeological Recovery - to expose the redoubt built overnight by rebel forces on June 16, 1775. The next day would bring the Battle of Bunker Hill, the bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War.

We’ll be excavating by the Monument for the next couple of weeks. Come out and say hi!

05/29/2026

We are wrapping up the site at 190 Bowdoin today. This includes documenting, photographing, & backfilling our trenches.

Profiling is when we create a measured drawing of a representative wall/s of the excavation unit to show the stratigraphy of the soil. We use a Munsell color chart to assign standardized soil color designations to our various strata.

In Boston, our A horizon (topsoil) is dark & organic. Our B horizon (subsoil) is split into a darker B1 & older, lighter B2 below it. The C horizon is glacial & predates human occupation in the area.

05/28/2026

Trench 4 is getting deep! We had some mysterious pits behind the ell at 190 Bowdoin. One bottomed out around 70cm with a giant rock and one contained a 19th century iron water pipe all the way down at 120cm! Cue the sad trombone. But our early 19th century shed, greenhouse, and workshop were set on some substantial foundations. Built to last!

05/26/2026

Final week at 190 Bowdoin has started! We’ve been wondering about the granite blocks scattered around so we did some research. These linear marks tell us that these blocks were quarried using “plug and feather” technology. Prior to this, a wedge or a cape chisel was used, but the marks produced were wedge-shaped.

Some of these blocks are visible under the bricks of the house’s foundation, indicating that the house was raised up sometime after about 1818 when plug and feather was popularized.

05/22/2026

After several days of acting coy, the wall-like jumble of stones in the workshop trench has finally resolved into a legitimate wall. And we recovered a small blade for a hacksaw from the surrounding soil matrix! It looks like most of the upper part of the wall was removed for reuse elsewhere.

05/22/2026

We have been busy here at 190 Bowdoin in Dorchester! We just got through a coal ash deposit in the workshop trench, which turned up this stamped button and metal drawer pull. This is a really cool find since it was a furniture maker’s workshop in the 19th century!