Battle of Baggensstäket

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Long-time Dear Readers may remember the visit I paid last May to the wooded Skogsö hills where the Battle of Baggensstäket was fought in 1719. Bo Knarrström, Tomas Englund and the others on their project team are now back on the site with their metal detectors, finding more and more objects from the battle. This time, I'm joining the team for two days. Tuesday, they were visited by celebrated military historian Peter Englund.

A battle fought with firearms seeds an area thickly with evidence for what has taken place in those few hours, and in many cases this evidence remains untouched for centuries. Few other things people do can make such an archaeological impression in such a short time. At Baggensstäket, the main find categories are musket balls, cast-iron hand grenade shards, nails from impromptu fortifications, buttons, remains of ruptured guns, and a few coins. Their distribution across the site allow insight into where the fighting was heaviest, where the musketeers were and where their targets, etc.

Different armies use different equipment, and in this case this shows even in the musket balls. It seems that the Swedish forces used large spherical balls, while the Russian invaders shot balls with a little conical tail, probably remaining from the casting process. This difference is of course very handy when you want to know which side was shooting at a certain position in the terrain. And at a hilly site like this, you know exactly from what side of a hill the fire was coming. All this allows Bo & Tomas to say things like "The Russians advanced up this slope toward the timber fortifications on that hill, lobbing grenades at it and taking heavy Swedish fire".

I found quite a bit of stuff for the project today, though the bits most likely to be battle-related were a couple of large carpentry spikes. Other team members found musket balls and a battle-period coin. I was using an unfamiliar White detector, probably the model my buddy Tim finds so much stuff with, and I did manage to find five coins -- dating however from 1898-1920, much later than the battle.

Tomorrow I'm bringing my own C-scope machine to see if I do better or worse with it.

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Two people with metal detectors and shovels vs. two horses? Some battle.

By Mustafa Mond, FCD (not verified) on 26 Apr 2007 #permalink

Isn't that Pippi Longstocking's horse?

Dear Dr. Martin Rundkvist,
Iâm glad to see metal detection projects in Sweden. I'm a Portuguese metal detectorist, and part of a group who's trying to give the best of metal detectorism to the Portuguese archaeology . At the moment we are making an association to give us credibility ... itâs hard project believe me. Here a metal detector its almost the same of a gun.
So Dr. Martin, i'm quite interest to know how the Swedish archaeology community look for metal detection and metal detectorists at the moment? and was always like that way? one more question , have you any specific law there in Sweden, for the metal detection regulation?
Iâm trying to get some information about metal detectorism in the others UE countryâs.
Maybe if you had some additional informationâs that you think that could be interesting for me, please let me know.

Many thank's Dr. Martin
I Hope you and your team have successfully results!

Duarte
duarte.quintas@gmail.com