Why research musket balls?

Hey everyone!

Happy Fall Break!

As many of the previous blogs by my fellow students have stated, we have split up into groups to perform deeper research into topics of our choice for our archaeological analysis class. I am joining Carson and will be doing further research into the musket balls at Fort St. Joseph. Why you may ask? Well let me tell you...

Flintlock hardware and ammunition recovered
from Fort St. Joseph. Photograph by Brock Giordano.  

You may have read in Carson's blog, French and British made muskets had different bore sizes, and therefore used different sizes, or caliber, of musket ball. We intend to measure and weigh musket balls in hopes of being able to determine  the sort of firearms that the people of the fort would have had access to (Sivilich, 1996). From our preliminary research, it seems like a lot of the musket balls are consistent with the weight of the ammunition used with French “Dragoon” rifles, which are a shorter rifle intended for use with calvary, although it is too early to say for sure.

There are a few things we need to keep in mind when analyzing musket balls. First, when a musket ball is made, it is intentionally made to be slightly larger than the bore of the rifle it is intended for. This is done so that when the ball is loaded, a small shaving of lead is removed from the ammunition, creating a much better seal between the musket ball and the barrel of the rifle itself. The difference between the size of the bore and the size of the musket ball is called “windage.” However, this is not always the case. Some musket balls were made to be wrapped in paper with the gunpowder in the same package. These musket balls would be smaller than the others, if they were present. Secondly, musket balls that have been fired would be pretty useless to measure for our purposes, as they deform when fired, so we are automatically disqualifying musket balls that appear to have been significantly deformed.

Thanks for reading and we hope to be able to update you soon on what we find!

Kieran

References:

Sivilich, D. M. (1996). Analyzing Musket Balls to Interpret a Revolutionary War Site. Historical Archaeology, 30(2), 101–109. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25616460