GIS and Remote Sensing Applications in the Search for World War II POW/MIAs in the Philippines

Summary

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

Over 81,500 U.S. servicemembers remain missing from America’s past conflicts extending to World War II (WWII). The great majority of this number, more than 72,000, relate to WWII alone. For the past several years, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has partnered with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) on the recovery of WWII personnel in the Philippines. Here we present a methodological approach used by the Center for the Recovery and Identification of the Missing at UIC that utilizes GIS and remote sensing applications in the archaeological search for missing personnel. GIS provides a critical tool for managing, visualizing, and analyzing historical spatial data related to missing individuals and aircraft from WWII. In this poster, we present various GIS applications/products, including: 1) Aircraft crash models that incorporate local topography and historical data (e.g. last-seen XY coordinates, flight paths, topography, aircraft height and speed, weather conditions, etc.); 2) Reconstruction and identification of past battlefields; and, 3) Modern landscape change from the last 80 years to the present. Methods outlined in this poster include the analysis and use of historical maps and sketches, aerial photographs from WWII, various satellite imagery sources (e.g. CORONA historic imagery), and GIS spatial analyses.

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): 37151.0