Tracking the Dead: Archaeological, GIS, and Geomorphological Approaches to Recovering Caskets and Human Remains after Hurricane Ida

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Hurricane Ida barreled ashore in southeast Louisiana as a category 4 tropical cyclone on August 29, 2021. The winds and storm surge caused massive damage to many of the coastal parishes, forcing evacuations, destroying homes and businesses, and displacing hundreds of Louisiana’s dead from their final resting places. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Louisiana’s Cemetery Response Task Force, a multiagency working group led by archaeologists, was tasked with recovering the displaced dead. Using helicopters, cranes, side-scanning sonar, divers, and large amounts of heavy equipment, more than 200 sets of mostly casketed remains were recovered from terrestrial and aqueous environments in the storm’s path. This study retrospectively reviews, using GIS technology, the transport of the caskets and remains using known points of origin and destination and compares those results against geomorphological wind and storm surge modeling to determine whether pre-storm assumptions can be applied in the future to better target remains recovery. Such probabilistic modeling could save time and funds by focusing post-storm search efforts and bringing faster and more complete closure to living descendants of the displaced dead who are often suffering both second grieving events as well as their own losses from the natural disaster.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35903.0