At Gettysburg's historic battlefield, archaeologists have uncovered a live 160-year-old artillery shell that required a specialized U.S. Army disposal team to detonate. The shell was discovered on February 8th at Little Round Top, a crucial hill that offered the Union troops an advantageous position during the Civil War. On the second day of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, both sides fought fiercely for approximately 90 minutes to gain control of Little Round Top, resulting in the deaths of numerous soldiers.
Despite its significance, Little Round Top was not an ideal location for an artillery offensive, as Confederate General Robert E. Lee reported in his 1864 account of the Gettysburg campaign. Although Union forces from Little Round Top delayed Confederate General Longstreet, he opted to bypass the hill rather than risk trying to capture it.
Century-Old Live Explosive
The National Park Service is currently undertaking an 18-month-long rehabilitation project at Little Round Top, aimed at conserving and safeguarding the battlefield scenery and installing fresh signs for tourists visiting Gettysburg. Archaeologist Steven Brann and his team from Stantec, an archaeological consultancy firm, were surveying the region using metal detectors when they came across an item buried almost two feet (0.6 meters) below the surface. Brann said that deploying metal detectors on battlefields is standard practice, as he explained in an email to Live Science.
According to Brann, the unexploded round they came across was approximately 7 inches (18 centimeters) long and weighed approximately 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms). "Procedures are in place to handle such objects if they are discovered," Brann said. The Army's 55th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company (EOD) stationed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was eventually summoned to retrieve and safely destroy the shell.
Furthermore, according to Jason Martz, a spokesperson for Gettysburg National Military Park, who communicated via email with Live Science, discovering unexploded ordnance on a battlefield is a relatively unusual occurrence. Since 1980, only five such findings have been reported. Steven Brann, on the other hand, explained that smaller items, such as bullets, percussion caps, and uniform buttons, are typically the most common items found during excavation, and many discovered objects often turn out to be modern garbage or items abandoned during monument construction, including nails and iron straps.
Historic ordnance discovered by archaeologists at Little Round Top in Gettysburg.
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Remnants of the Battle of Gettysburg
However, excavation work can be hazardous, as shown by the recent discovery. Martz emphasized that archaeology work must be finished before any soil disturbance takes place and that it is against federal law for members of the public to dig or employ metal detectors to uncover these objects.
Following the Gettysburg National Military Park's Facebook post, various commenters and history enthusiasts bemoaned the fact that the ordnance had to be detonated, as identified by Capt. Matthew Booker, the EOD commander, as a 3-inch Dyer or Burton shell specifically used for a rifled cannon. Nevertheless, Martz mentioned: "This particular shell hasn't revealed its entire story yet." The park is presently carrying out comprehensive research on the shell and its discovery location, attempting to determine, for example, whether it was fired by Union or Confederate forces.
The park will share this information with the public once it is available. Martz also stated that the discovery of the shell, almost 160 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, is a compelling and palpable connection to the past, emphasizing that the battlefield still has narratives to reveal.
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