Planning for the Battle(field)

Summary

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is tasked with recovering missing military personnel from conflict areas all around the world. In the past we have dealt most often with individual ground losses, expedient burials, and aircraft crashes. But soon we will be confronting the daunting, and very different, responsibility of the recovery of multiple individuals from battlefields. Battlefields differ from our ‘standard’ excavation sites in many ways, namely, the number of casualties, the size of the site, the presence of enemy combatants, the length of time of battle, movement of troops, and complex formation processes during and since the battle. It will not be efficient or successful to approach these sites with previous recovery techniques. This paper lays out a recovery plan for approaching battlefield archaeology, given the unique constraints DPAA deals with, as well as highlighting the unique and vast resources from which we can draw.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Battlefield Archaeology: Past, Present, and Future

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16923