Start with Why: The Development of a Project-Based Approach at DPAA

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

DPAA is responsible for the fullest possible accounting of over 81,000 unaccounted-for personnel, each of them a service member who gave their life for their country. While the sheer number of missing U.S. personnel from past conflicts is sobering, the DPAA is accountable to all of our missing, to their families, and to the nation, for timely and accurate case progression. To address the scale of our mission, the DPAA and its predecessors have utilized project-based approaches that systematically and thoroughly work to locate and identify our missing, by approaching them as bounded groups delimited by geography, time, and/or military operation. This paper will discuss the inception and development of project-based approaches at DPAA, provide historical and archaeological examples, and explore how this methodology continues to evolve.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow