Hello,
My name is Carson Manfred and currently I am a senior at Western Michigan University. You may remember me from this summer when I was working at Fort St. Joseph as the Lab Coordinator for the 2023 WMU archaeological field school. After a long, but rewarding, field season, the other field students and I signed up for a new class based around researching the cultural materials recovered from Fort St. Joseph.
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| Olivia and I excavating in our unit in 2021. |
I have always had an interest in musket balls, stemming from one of my first finds in the 2022 field school. That interest has led to me to researching musket balls recovered from the site in hopes of learning more about the firearms and ammunitions used at the fort. Specifically, I will be performing an analysis on musket balls measuring their size and determining if they may have been shot or not. I also plan on looking at the densities of musket balls across the site. Through this research, I am hoping to discover where musket balls were made at as well as by who at the site, whether it was British or French.
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| Different sizes of musket balls recovered from the site. |
From my research on this subject so far, I have learned that in order to measure the musket balls I will need to convert the millimeter measurement I take with the calipers to calibers the standard measurement type used for musket balls. The conversion for this is .254 mm equals 1 caliber. This is important because I have learned that different types of firearms were prominently used throughout the colonial period. These guns were muskets, carbines, and pistols. While they were all flintlock weapons, they fired different sized bullets. Starting in the early 1700s, the British began standardizing the size of the musket balls that would be used for their muskets since that was what a majority of their military was using. Due to this, almost all early 1700 and later British Muskets fired .69 caliber shot, whereas French muskets fired .66 caliber shot. Most of the carbines for both the British and the French shot .65 caliber shot, while the pistols for both the British and the French had a varying caliber that they shot between .45-.56 Caliber. I am hoping that by measuring the musket balls recovered, I will not only be able to identify whether or not the Musket ball was British or French, but also be able to find out what type of gun the ball was intended for: Musket, Carbine, or a Pistol.
I am excited to further my own research and further our understanding of arms and ammunition at Fort St. Joseph.
Carson
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