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

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in 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 2015, the United States Congress merged several existing federal agencies across the country into a single organization, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), responsible for accounting for the 81,000 U.S. military personnel missing from past conflicts, covering World War II to the Gulf War. The DPAA operates in 50 countries world-wide and has identified over 1,400 missing personnel since 2016 through the work of subject matter experts in numerous fields. Over the last decade, numerous challenges and opportunities to the accounting mission have emerged, impacting all facts of DPAA’s efforts, from research and case development to field operations and laboratory analysis. This session will discuss these challenges and opportunities from historical, archaeological, and geospatial perspectives, with topics ranging from climate change, urbanization, geopolitical environments, and illegal salvaging to research trends and approaches, emerging technologies, community relationships, and global partnerships