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Secrets of the Three Cranes Tavern

Destroyed in the Battle of Bunker Hill, but still talking to archaeologists

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Boston city archaeologist Joe Bagley handles the Colonial-era cannonballs in his lab with great care. Bagley knows that while most cannonballs made in 18th-century America were cast out of heavy iron, some—those the British were experimenting with—were filled with gunpowder. And they still are.

“When these cannonballs hit the ground, they would explode like a small bomb,” says Bagley (CAS’06), who earned a master’s in archaeology at UMass Boston after graduating from BU. He is three years into a job that oversees all archaeological work on public sites in Boston. “So if we find one in our collection that is lighter than the others, it means we might have an unexploded bomb and a very big hazard. We were told to evacuate and call the Boston Police bomb squad right away if we ever come across one.”

The cannonballs in Bagley’s workspace come from Charlestown’s Three Cranes Tavern site, which dates to 1629 and was unearthed in the 1980s in an archaeological survey that was required before work could start on Boston’s infamous Big Dig. The many boxes of artifacts from the Three Cranes dig were sent to Boston’s City Archaeology Lab in West Roxbury, where they languished for almost three decades.

Now 31, Bagley wasn’t the city archaeologist at the time, but his job often involves the findings from digs done by his predecessors. For the Three Cranes project, Bagley and his team of volunteers are studying thousands of artifacts stored in more than 200 acid-free boxes, hoping to learn what they can about the day-to-day lives of Colonial Americans.