Colleagues at the University of Nebraska are seeking comparative data on
gun parts and asked me to post this to HISTARCH in their behalf. If you
have any information to share, or questions about the research project,
please respond directly to Mr. LaBounty at the email address provided
below.

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Searching for Information on Gun Part Assemblages

Please help us find information on frontier era assemblages of guns,
discarded and recycled gun parts, gun related kits and caches, and tools
that may have been used for gun repair. We are continuing a project started
some years ago on the treatment of guns in frontier era Native and
Euroamerican communities, our goal being to investigate how novel and
precise mechanical technologies were managed in North American frontier
communities (Bleed & Watson, 1991). We plan to use concepts borrowed from
operations research to link patterns in gun part assemblages to repair and
maintenance strategies, and are particularly interested in materials from
eastern North America, but would appreciate suggestions about any published
or unpublished archeological assemblages that include one or more gun
parts. Please make any suggestions to [log in to unmask]

Thanks,

Peter Bleed and Andrew LaBounty, University of Nebraska-Lincoln


Further Reading:

Bleed, Peter
1991 "Operations Research and Archaeology" American Antiquity.
Vol.56(1):19-35.
1991 "Frontier Flintlocks: A Fault-tree Analysis of Firearm Use At Contact
Period Sites on the Great Plains." Great Plains Research.
Vol.1(2):233-48 (senior author with D. Watson).