Colonial militarisation and erasure: Archaeological traces of Bunker Hill reveal systemic violence and forgotten resistance
Original framing: “Archaeologists find musket balls and fort linked to the Battle of Bunker Hill - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Bunker Hill was not an isolated event but a microcosm of 17th-18th century settler-colonial warfare, where forts like those in Jamestown and Quebec served as nodes in a transatlantic network of violence. The battle’s legacy includes the 1790 Naturalization Act, which codified whiteness as a prerequisite for citizenship, and the 1830 Indian Removal Act, both of which were justified by the same racialised logic as the fort’s construction. Parallels exist in other colonial conflicts, such as the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, where forts were used to enforce apartheid-like land policies.
The discovery of musket balls and fort remnants at Bunker Hill is not a neutral archaeological find but a material trace of the colonial project’s violence, where land dispossession, racialised slavery, and militarised policing were institutionalised as 'progress.
' The mainstream narrative’s focus on the battle as a singular event obscures its role in a centuries-long pattern of erasure, from the 1620s dispossession of the Pawtucket to the post-war betrayal of African-descended soldiers. A systemic reading reveals how the fort’s logic of enclosure persists in modern carceral landscapes, from ICE detention centres to gentrified urban 'heritage' districts. Decolonising this site requires co-stewardship with Indigenous communities, reparations for marginalised voices, and a shift from 'commemoration' to 'restorative memory'—where the land’s wounds are ritually cleansed and its stories are reclaimed by those it has silenced. The trickster’s laughter, in this context, is the sound of history’s contradictions being exposed, inviting us to ask: who benefits from the solemnity of battlefields, and who pays the price for their erasure?