Narrator: As dawn breaks, the two armies prepare for battle.

The Continental artillery fires the first shots on the British infantry massing in front of them.

The Battle of Camden has begun.

[Gunfire] The standard weapon for most troops was a smooth-bore musket.

The muskets had limited range and were highly inaccurate.

Soldiers were trained to use their weapons for volley fire at enemy formations, rather than pick individual targets.

Warfare at the end of the 18th century is very much based on linear tactics.

You need to have lines of men-- two, normally three deep at this period-- actually all firing at once so as to get as many bullets as possible-- musket balls-- going down range.

Narrator: Soldiers were drilled to be as efficient as possible at the laborious process of loading their muskets.

The soldier reaches into his leather pouch, takes out a cartridge like this.

What happens is a soldier, when he is recruited, is required to have good side teeth, so that he's able to bite the top of the cartridge off, [spits] spit the top out, pour some into the pan here, close the frizzen over it to protect it from rain or being blown away.

Then, upend the musket... and pour the rest of the powder down the bore, then the ball and the paper containing it on top of it, and-- ramrod out-- drive the whole lot hard down into the breach.

Now we go to full cock, and as we pull the trigger, the flint will fly into the frizzen there, so you get the-- the initial flash, and then it goes through to the main charge.

Main charge detonates.

Ball is sent down towards the target.

Narrator: The percentage of musket balls that were fired and found a target would have been very low.

Spent ammunition makes up more than 95% of the artifacts recovered from the battlefield.

Stephen Humphreys can tell by the caliber which side they belong to.

So, what we've got here are a couple of American balls.

This one has been fired.

And we know that because it has a ramrod mark on it, which means it has been rammed down into a firearm and, presumably, has exited the firearm because we didn't find it inside a firearm, of course.

This one is particularly interesting.

This is a British ball.

This calculates to 0.7 caliber.

So we think it came out of a British Brown Bess.

But the interesting thing about this particular ball is that it does have fabric patterning on it.

So the only reason you really would have something like this is if it went through cloth.

So, obviously, our conclusion there is that this was probably fired by a British soldier, probably impacted an American soldier.

Obviously the fate of that individual will never be known, but with a ball-- a lead ball--of this size going into velocities they went at that time... definitely wouldn't have been a pleasant experience.

Likely would have been, badly damaging or fatal.