The Social Life of Crash Sites: Understanding World War II Sites in Context in the Search for Missing Air Crew

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological sites are only rarely preserved as pristine moments in time, unaltered since the site was formed. More often, they are a continuous production, forming a part of the social and cultural landscape of the surrounding area. In this paper, we draw upon Appadurai’s idea of the “the social life of things” to explore the social life of World War II aircraft crash sites, through case studies drawn from our work at sites in Central Europe. Such sites, themselves disruptions into local terrains that may have archaeological significance, often preserve a record of visitation, development, and alteration reaching to the present day. One of the challenges in fulfilling the DPAA’s mission of providing the fullest possible accounting of America’s missing military personnel is disentangling the many ways that the postdeposition life of the sites has affected the potential for recovery.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38818.0