Kiska: Alaska’s Underwater Battlefield

Summary

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In July 2018 members of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware spent two weeks conducting an exploratory remote-sensing survey to locate and document WWII-era submerged archaeological sites in the waters off Kiska Island, Alaska, one of the last and most remote islands in the Aleutian chain. The often-forgotten Aleutian campaign was the sole WWII campaign fought on North American soil and Kiska Island is one of the few U.S. territories occupied by foreign forces in the last 200 years. This paper explores the historical context of the Aleutian Campaign, project methodology, and results with an emphasis on the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) in archaeological survey. The project was funded by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Office of Ocean Exploration and Research grant and Project Recover.

Cite this Record

Kiska: Alaska’s Underwater Battlefield. Andrew Pietruszka, Eric Terrill, Mark Moline, Heidi Batchelor, Eric Gallimore, Bob Hess, Andy Nager, Matthew Breece, Eric White. 2020 ( tDAR id: 457299)

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Keywords

General
AUV Survey WWII

Geographic Keywords
United States of America

Temporal Keywords
WWII

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): 404