Broken Wings, Recovered Souls: Understanding Site Formation Processes and Developing a Lexicon for Terrestrial Military Aircraft Crash Site Types Associated with the Recovery of Missing Personnel Remains

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Strides Towards Standard Methodologies in Aeronautical Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This presentation is intended to serve as a basic guide for archaeologists to the several types of military aircraft wreck sites and debris fields that may be encountered—describing both the processes that created the incidents and the processes that subsequently affected the aircraft wreckage and human remains that may be associated with terrestrial aircraft loss sites—and suggest a common lexicon and description to better categorize loss types that investigators are likely to encounter when surveying and excavating missing military aircraft. By appropriately identifying crash sites by type, a body of information may be applied by site investigators that betters aids them in understanding what material evidence and artifacts may be present and what activities and post-crash processes are likely to have occurred that have affected site integrity where human remains likely may be found for recovery.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Strides Towards Standard Methodologies in Aeronautical Archaeology

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 952