Shooting the Past: Colonial and Revolutionary War Firearms Live Fire Experiments and Spherical Ball Performance

Summary

This poster presents the results of a live fire experiment with Colonial and Revolutionary War firearms. It is a beginning of investigations of late pre-modern gun use. Firearms were a central feature of combat for the past 600 years and a significant vector of political, ecological, and cultural change. Experimental archaeology has emerged as a rigorous approach to the study of material reflections of human behavior. In the live fire experiment, we observed impacts of experimentally fired balls into ballistic gelatin, an accepted tissue simulant with end coverings to simulate clothing of the era, and into a sand backstop. We also used a wooden palisade made up of dry loblolly pine, green loblolly pine, live oak, and maple palings to obtain bullet impact information. Projectile deformation associated with varied ranges were catalogued. The results of these experiments permit archaeologists to better interpret recovered projectiles. 

Cite this Record

Shooting the Past: Colonial and Revolutionary War Firearms Live Fire Experiments and Spherical Ball Performance. Patrick Severts, Joel Bohy, William Rose, Charles Haecker, Douglas Scott. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441731)

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 856