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BURLINGTON — Under a cluster of Virginia Black Pine trees at Alamance Battleground, a team of volunteers gathered on Friday and Saturday to search for pieces of history.

It’s the first step in an archaeological dig to gather information and possibly artifacts from the site of the Battle of Alamance.

“What we’re hoping to do is ascertain more information about exactly what happened here,” Bryan Dalton , the Alamance Battleground site manager, said Saturday.

Volunteers from the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources; Wake Forest, N.C. State and Elon universities; and the Old North State Detectorists joined Dalton and local surveyors at the War of the Regulation battleground in Alamance County to gather information and search for Colonial-era artifacts.

“We’re trying to enhance the traditional interpretation of this battle,” Marty Matthews said.

Matthews is the curator of research for N.C. Historic Sites and he supervised the search.

The War of the Regulation was fought between back country farmers, the Regulators, and the Colonial militia under the command of the royal governor, William Tryon .

Regulators were rebelling against what they thought to be corrupt officials and excessive taxes.

This weekend, the volunteers searched what they believed to be the place where the Regulators camped.

On Friday, faculty and students from Wake Forest used a tool called a magnetometer to detect “disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field” caused by metals in an attempt to locate buried artifacts.

Saturday, volunteers used metal detectors to survey the same area to see if there were any consistency from Friday.

In places where both the magnetometer and detectors got hits, areas were marked with flags and GPS coordinates so the spot can be explored at a later time.

“We’re trying use the least invasive way to research this,” Dalton said.

The research team was able to do limited digging but did not turn up anything related to the battle.

Matthews said Saturday that is the first event of an long-term project.

“It’ll probably take a year to do it,” he said.

State archaeologists will use the GPS coordinates to complete a more extensive search at a later time.

“This is being done for the citizens of North Carolina and to honor the sacrifices of the men who fought and died here,” Dalton said.

Contact Tiffany S. Jones at 449-4731 or tiffany.jones@news-record.com