Civil War Combat Trenching: What It Was and How to Find It
Author(s): Philip Shiman; Julia Steele; David Lowe
Year: 2016
Summary
The last year of the Civil War witnessed a dramatic change in military tactics from open-field fighting to trench warfare as the soldiers increasingly covered themselves with fortifications on the battlefield, leading to the entrenched gridlock at Petersburg. When under fire or if combat was imminent, the soldiers used an innovative process in which they fortified progressively, starting with basic shelters and gradually building them up into complex and impregnable earth-and-wood defenses. The remains of these combat trenches, in all stages of development, can be found on a number of late-war battlefields today. However, the early stage works in particular, consisting of tiny pits and scarped slopes, can be hard to identify and are often overlooked by researchers. With the help of KOCOA analysis, contemporary images, recent photographs, and LIDAR images of Petersburg National Battlefield, this presentation will provide some tips for recognizing and identifying combat trenching.
Cite this Record
Civil War Combat Trenching: What It Was and How to Find It. Philip Shiman, Julia Steele, David Lowe. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434409)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
American Civil War
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Fortifications
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Petersburg
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
Historic
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 716