A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Metheny.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In November 1943, more than 1,000 U.S. Marines and sailors died wresting control of Tarawa Atoll from a Japanese garrison approximately 3,000 strong. After the battle, the Marines buried most of their dead in a series of cemeteries and small burials scattered across the island of Betio, where the assault...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex H Peterson.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Today, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) pursues missing servicemembers and unresolved casualties from past conflicts. Agency efforts have shown a clear need for, and benefit of, an interdisciplinary approach throughout all aspects of case progression, beginning with historical research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan M. Mumford.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. One of the darkest, and less known tragedies in American history is the 15 December 1944 attack and sinking of Oryoku Maru. The Japanese passenger liner, turned military auxiliary transport ship, was used during the Japanese evacuation of the Philippines in World War II to relocate 1,619 U.S. and Allied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina L. Bunyard. Anna D'Jernes.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During World War II, an estimated 27,000 American service members went missing from water contexts in the Pacific theater, from ship sinkings and aircraft losses. Immediately after the war, these were only rarely pursued due to technological limitations. Today, the pursuit of underwater losses is one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany G Hall.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) undertakes critical missions to locate, recover, and identify missing military personnel. In this pursuit, efficient field data management is paramount. This abstract evaluates the implementation of ESRI's Field Maps application within DPAA's operations. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Bleichner.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. DPAA’s Partnerships and Innovation Directorate was created in 2015 in order to help the Agency leverage the expertise, assets, and capabilities of a global partner network in its effort to account for missing US servicemembers. Partners serve as a force multiplier and continue to be a critical asset to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah P Fleming. Kim Roche. Jesse Stephen. Anne Nunn. Conner Wiktorowicz.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) remains committed to finding the best tools and technologies to achieve the personnel accounting mission. To that end, an Innovation Program was launched in 2021 through the Partnerships and Innovation Directorate. The Innovation Program aims to provide a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alba Mazza. Hannah Fleming.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. 81,000 Americans are still missing-in-action, and about 41,000 of them were lost at sea. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s (DPAA) mission is to search, recover and identify remains of missing personnel from World War II to recent conflicts. DPAA developed a multi-year, multi-objective underwater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Irwin.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. DPAA projects often encounter challenges unique to the intersection of archaeology and the accounting mission. Given the breadth and scope of the accounting mission, the effort to locate and recover missing US servicemembers from past conflicts takes DPAA partners all over the globe. But in the Pacific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Poul E Graversen.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. DPAA currently estimates that approximately 2,000 U.S. Sailors and Marines are entombed aboard dozens of ships and submarines that sunk during World War II in the Java and South China Seas. Large scale illegal salvaging companies have been targeting the steel and iron of these WWII-era vessels. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert S. Thompson.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The U.S. military commenced Operations Watchtower and Toenails with little planning for battlefield burials. In the Solomon Islands, the Allied forces established ad hoc cemeteries on several islands and developed rudimentary plans for dealing with the hundreds of service members killed in action. As a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelley S. Esh. Dawn A. Berry. Jeffrey K. Johnson.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. DPAA is responsible for the fullest possible accounting of over 81,000 unaccounted-for personnel, each of them a service member who gave their life for their country. While the sheer number of missing U.S. personnel from past conflicts is sobering, the DPAA is accountable to all of our missing, to their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory O. Stratton. Richard K. Wills.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2023, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), with the support of the U.S. Navy's Supervisor of Salvage and Diving (SUPSALV) and working in conjunction with the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU), embarked on the underwater excavation of a WWII U.S. heavy bomber wreck site in the Bismarck Sea,...