"At this point there was terrible firing, and half of the Englishmen...were slain": The Rearguard Action at the Battle of Brandywine, 11 September 1777 - A comparative dialogic of Captain Ewald's battlefield experience as a function of terrain analysis in battlefield study bridging the semantic and the semiotic of a battlespace.

Summary

DRAFT

 "At this point there was terrible firing, and half of the Englishmen...were slain": The Rearguard Action at the Battle of Brandywine, 11 September 1777  

kevin m. donaghy

Temple University

Department of Anthropology

ABSTRACT

Battlefield Archaeology has gained new energy in part due to: advances in remote sensing and data management, improved access to primary documents and GIS technologies.  A question arises of whether we can improve our battlefield modeling based on military doctrine and the cognitive perceptions of recording participants.  The pragmatic testimony of Captain Ewald’s diary expresses a crisp attention to landscape details often overlooked by other participants when describing the military geography.  Can this narrative style of assessment of the experienced battlefield situation be useful when considering objective battlefield analyses such as KOCOA and military topography?  Ewald’s experiential military narrative will provide a semiotic basis for design that may encourage a structural approach to battlefield temporal-spatial reconstructions. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• "Not A Trade For One To Follow Who Has No Knowledge Of It": Captain Johann Ewald And The Historical Archaeology Of The 1777 Philadelphia Campaign   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 979