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Posted on 07/07/2026 1:20:41 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Buried side by side since 1836, one Mexican and one Texan cannonball lay untouched beneath the Alamo’s soil for nearly two centuries.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
-Archaeologists excavating near the church at the Alamo have discovered two cannonballs fired during the famous 1836 battle there.
-The cannonballs sat close to each other for roughly 190 years before being discovered.
-One cannonball was from Mexico and the other was made with iron from Texas.
Two fully intact Battle of the Alamo-era cannonballs have sat undisturbed in the dirt outside the northeast corner of the Alamo Church, likely since the infamous 1836 siege. Recently discovered sitting only a few feet away from each other, they offer a distillation of the battle itself. One cannonball is bronze and comes from the Mexican Army, while the other was made of iron by the Texans trapped inside the Alamo.
“The first one we found, I thought, there’s no way in the world we just found a cannonball from 190 years ago,” Kolby Lanham, the Alamo’s senior researcher and historian, said in a statement. “And then fast forward just a couple of months, and we found a second one. It’s just a huge kind of once-in-a-lifetime deal—but obviously it’s happened twice.”
The first find came on March 5, a day before the 190th anniversary of the climax of the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, a 13-day siege during the Texas Revolution. The battle, in what is now downtown San Antonio, killed 180 Texan rebels, including Davy Crockett, who were fighting for Texan independence from Mexico. Made from solid bronze, the first cannonball found by archaeologists was likely from the Mexican Army. Then came the June 2 discovery in the next plot over, a cannonball made of iron that experts believe came from the Texans. The second discovery was a bit larger, and experts believe it was shot from a cannon made for six-pound cannonballs.
“It’s a huge deal. I don’t think you can undersell it,” Tiffany Lindley, the Alamo’s director of archaeology, said in a video provided by the Alamo Trust. “We have a lot of fragments of shrapnel, but a solid shot, we haven’t found that before, and this is the second one.”
Lindley said that after finding the first cannonball, they thought there was no way they could top it. “That’s it, the [excavation] project is made, let’s pack it up and be done,” she joked. “Then we found another one.”
Lindley was offsite the day of the second find, and an archaeologist simply sent her a bomb emoji—and she knew she should head back. The same archaeologist found both cannonballs adjacent to each other at approximately the same depth at the northeast corner of the Alamo’s church, which was founded as a Spanish mission and reconstructed in 1755. The cannonballs were in a “clean context,” meaning there weren’t any modern intrusions in the immediate environment around their resting spots.
“What that tells us is that they were in likely their original deposition,” Lindley said. “So whenever they were dropped the very first time—possibly in 1836, probably—they haven’t been touched since. And that’s what makes them extra special. Not only do we have a really amazing artifact, we know the story behind it.”
Teams have continually found artifacts across the site’s entire timeline, Lindley said, from pre-Alamo occupation through the mission era, the 1800s battles, and into its industrial history. Now, with both cannonballs in hand, the Alamo’s archaeology team plans to bring in experts to fully analyze their size, materials, and origins.
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Did they find it in the basement?!
Can you say Bocci...
Looks Series! Davy Crockett was a proto- Freeper for sure.
Pick up your balls and load up your cannon...
Technically, the battle didn't kill 180 Texans. It killed some of them. But then Santa Anna ordered the massacre of the surviving prisoners, most of them wounded. That, plus the massacre of prisoners at Goliad, is why Mexico was whipped by the Texicans. Santa Anna thought brutality and terror would break the rebels.
Oops.
When news of the twin massacres got out, every Texican who could carry a rifle flocked to Sam Houston. The wonder is that Santa Anna wasn't summarily executed at San Jacinto. I guess some officers with their wits about them got to him first. Under the circumstances, Santa Anna thought it prudent to "negotiate" a surrender and recognition of Texas independence.
The Texas one was bigger.
After the battle, he didn’t have a leg to stand on.
This changes everything I thought I knew about the Alamo.
You can’t “undersell” it?
And the Mexican one was on the wrong side of the border.
When I was a kid, growing up in Portsmouth Virginia, a friend of mine found an American canon ball from the Battle of Craney Island (June 22, 1813) from the War of 1812. Made the local newspaper.
I understand they’re going to store these cannonballs in the basement
Pétanque
Married an Italian...It was a Boys Only game...You know....the drink and smoke gang.
Dueling cannons ...
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