News---ISO Atlanta's Battlefields: "It's just a huge crime scene."

Archaeologist Mines Atlanta Landscape for Remains of the Clash Between Union and Confederate Armies, Cameron McWhirter, Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2011.

When Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman arrived here in June 1864, he wrote to his superiors, "The whole country is one vast fort." Gen. Sherman and his 100,000 men encountered 65,000 Confederates dug in along 12 miles of earthworks at Kennesaw Mountain. After fierce fighting, the rebels retreated to nearby Atlanta. Several more battles ensued before Union forces took the city, dealing a crippling blow to the South. Today, metro Atlanta—a land of expressways, subdivisions and shopping malls—has grown to about 5.7 million people, from about 10,000 in the 1860s. So it's easy to assume that evidence of the famous clash of armies has been obliterated except for that preserved in museums, parks and monuments.

That assumption is wrong, according to Garrett Silliman, a 36-year-old archaeologist for an environmental and land-use consulting firm. Mr. Silliman's employer, Edwards-Pitman Environmental Inc., has a contract with Cobb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation to identify battle sites to preserve—or at least excavate—before bulldozers plow them under. He is hoping that as the 150th anniversary of the Civil War arrives this year, governments will take a renewed interest in preservation.

Battlefield archaeology is meticulous work. It takes years of education and mastery of sensitive equipment, including global positioning systems, ground-penetrating radar, advanced metal detectors and extremely precise mapping software. "It's just a huge crime scene," said William Lees, president of the Society for Historical Archaeology and a professor at the University of Western Florida. "You are just trying to figure out what happened there by what was left behind."

If Mr. Silliman finds a clump of unspent bullets, he knows it was where men fumbled with ammunition shortly before an attack. If he finds shattered bits of bullets and belt buckles, he knows it is where soldiers encountered heavy fire. This forensic detail helps Mr. Silliman and other archaeologists develop a much clearer picture of parts of specific battles and also helps them understand overall military strategy at the time. "We can really create a good picture of what was happening even with a limited archaeological record," Mr. Silliman said.

On a cold January morning, Mr. Silliman set out in his Land Rover in search of forgotten battlefields hidden amid heavily developed suburbs. His first stop was a municipal water tank atop a low hill in the shadow of Kennesaw Mountain. In 2005, Mr. Silliman was surveying at the bottom of the hill when he fell in a hole. Cutting away kudzu with a machete, he discovered what he thought was an advanced trench line. Looking at maps and accounts of the fighting, he determined the unnamed hill was likely an advanced position of Alabama Confederates, captured by Union Midwesterners on June 15, 1864.

Five years after he fell in the hole, Mr. Silliman has come back—with funding, county permission and equipment—to see what is still here. Mr. Silliman, who with a trim rounded beard and knit cap looks like a cross between a hippie and a Civil War colonel, hoisted on his back a GPS device that looked like a futuristic trumpet and pointed skyward. He carried a notebook to sketch battle lines that he would later scan into his computer.

There were trenches made of piled mud and stone, running along the hill. The water tank destroyed trenches higher up the hill. A nearby utility line and a subdivision destroyed more down the hill. But the side of the hill, which is tough to build on, had been spared. The fortifications still stand a few feet high, despite years of erosion. "It's amazing how well preserved these things are, given everything that's happened," Mr. Silliman said as he tramped through the forest. Mr. Silliman stopped every few feet to log data to the satellite and sketch the line. He will probably come back in the spring with a metal detector to try to find bullets. Unlike collectors, who dig up items to trade or sell, Mr. Silliman uses detectors to figure out the battle's progress.

Many first-hand reports from the battles and later recollections were wrong. Officers confused by the fighting or eager to impress superiors wrote accounts of battles that often made themselves look better and the fighting fiercer than they actually were. It's like any crime scene. Witnesses can't be trusted, but physical evidence can.

Mr. Silliman's guess is that professionals have surveyed less than 10% of all the battle lines around Atlanta. Like many archaeologists, he considers his work on these forgotten battlefields to be more of a calling than a job. He has ancestors who fought for the Union, and says he wants to preserve what he can for future generations. "It's our Iliad," he said of the conflict.

First Image Caption: Garrett Silliman points toward a rifle pit he found this month while using a GPS system in the woods of Smyrna, Ga. The detritus of war—bullets, uniforms, cannon shot, swords and, of course, corpses—was strewn across the region in the aftermath. Trenches, both intricate defenses built over weeks by engineers and shallow pits frantically dug by infantry under fire, snaked for miles.

Second Image Caption: Garrett Silliman uploads the site's coordinates for comparison with old Civil War era maps. But the work's goal is simple: to reconstruct a battle.

Text and Image Source: Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2011.

CWL: There will be a time when CWL is the guy in the photograph.

Beth wrote:
"Fascinating story. Hopefully he'll be able to find much more, despite the depletion of the battlefields."

News---The Science of Civil War Atlanta's Archaeology

Science Digs Into Civil War Sites, Cameron McWhorter, US News and World Report Science and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 29, 2009.

Just north of I-20 on Moreland Avenue in Atlanta sits an intersection on a low hill. There's a gas station and a liquor store and some other businesses, but not much else. Though you would never know it from the unremarkable view, thousands of men died here 145 years ago in one of the fiercest fights of the Civil War. Confederate Private Sam Watkins, wounded in the battle that July day in 1864, recalled bodies, horses, wagons and cannon "piled indiscriminately everywhere" and "streams of blood."
"'Twas a picture of carnage and death," he wrote. It was a day and a place he would never forget.

But Atlanta did forget. Since the war, the city has sprawled out in every direction with buildings, roads and traffic, paving over this battleground and others. Today most people assume any archaeological record of the clash of two enormous armies more than 160,000 men has been obliterated by modernity. Not so fast. A small but growing number of Georgia archaeologists and history buffs are starting to use high-tech gear, ground-penetrating radar, metal detectors, new software programs and detective-style techniques to detail with amazing precision what happened when U.S. Gen. William T. Sherman made good on his promise to "make Georgia howl."

Decades ago, archaeology was about spades, notebooks and educated guesses. You found a field where you thought something might have been, and you dug pits. Trying to piece together what happened on a battlefield for several hours of one day more than a century ago seemed preposterous. This was especially true in metro Atlanta, where bulldozers have been working overtime for decades. But now this loose group of experts call them Civil War CSI are on the case. They still use historical records and spades, but they also use a whole lot more.

Garrett Silliman, a 35-year-old archaeologist at an environmental consulting firm, has started giving talks to experts in the area and in other states on new approaches that are helping find new Civil War sites and new information in this megalopolis of drywall and asphalt. "A lot of this technology has been around for years, but now it's a lot cheaper and easier to use," he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "For some of us, it's becoming standard operating procedure."

The technology includes:

GIS: geographic information systems technology detailed mapping software that can give a three-dimensional view of an area, and impose old Civil War maps on modern maps.

GPS: global positioning system, which uses satellite to pinpoint the location of a found object or entrenchment.

Ground-penetrating radar. Developed by the U.S. Army to find enemy tunnels during the Vietnam War, the technology used to require a truck and many people to operate it. Today, one person can carry it on his back. The radar can find disturbances many feet underground, revealing Civil War earthworks or battles. Soil and relic testing. Lab testing can give detailed reports on everything from the age of an item to traces of blood.

Metal detectors that are far more precise than the clunky ones popular with Civil War relic hunters. Several Georgians are embracing these new tools. William Drummond, a professor at Georgia Tech's College of Architecture, has spent years promoting GIS technology for use in identifying, analyzing and preserving battlefields.

Dan Elliott, an archaeologist who has been doing Revolutionary War research and some Civil War research in coastal and central Georgia, was trained to use ground-penetrating radar about eight years ago. At the time, only four people in the state knew how to use it — and almost no one was using it for archaeology. Today, more than 20 people in the state are trained and it is a common tool for archaeologists.
"Basically we're stealing ideas that medical technology had 20 years ago," he said. "It gives you Superman eyes to see under the ground." Lu Ann De Cunzo, president of the Society for Historical Archaeology and a professor at the University of Delaware, said these technological advances have given archaeologists an exactitude no one could have imagined only a few years ago. "We can really fine-tune what we are seeing," she said.

The precision this technology offers is startling. To demonstrate, Silliman picked up a small plastic bag on his desk. Inside was a bullet that he recently recovered from a site at Tanyard Creek in Buckhead. Through global positioning he knew the exact location where the bullet was found. Examining its markings, he was able to tell it was a British-made bullet fired from model 1853 Enfield rifle. Because it was slightly marked, he could tell it had been rammed into a gun that had been fouled, probably from being shot a lot that day. Because the lead bullet didn't have any impact marks, he could tell it had not hit a target, but probably just traveled through the air, then dropped to the ground. Military records showed fighting at that location. Using mapping software showing modern Atlanta overlaid with Civil War fortifications, he traced back 1,100 to 1,300 yards the distance an Enfield-fired bullet would travel — to Rebel earthworks.

Silliman held up the little gray missile and declared confidently it was fired between 2 and 4 p.m. on July 20, 1864, by a retreating Confederate soldier. The Rebel missed whatever he was trying to hit. A reporter asked Silliman if he was sure. Silliman smiled slightly. "Plus or minus 120 feet," he said.

Sitting in his small but ordered office in Smyrna, Silliman pulled up on his computer a topographic map of modern Atlanta. He then superimposed historical maps of Union and Confederate defenses, soldiers' camps and where battles took place. Red lines signified Confederate areas; blue showed Union areas. Purple showed areas that have been surveyed by archaeologists. Very little of metro Atlanta was purple. Silliman, who with his lanky build and goatee could pass for a Union corporal, hopes to see that change with new technology.

He said for years traditional archaeology has focused on small sites that were inhabited for long periods, such as Native American villages. The Civil War, he said, requires a different approach especially in Georgia. Silliman, who was raised in New Hampshire but earned his graduate degree at Georgia State University, is the resident Civil War expert at Edwards-Pitman, a subcontractor that does environmental and historical assessments for companies and government agencies that are planning to develop land. Most of his work is in metro Atlanta for the Georgia Department of Transportation or agencies looking to see if any area has historical significance. Silliman insists that huge swaths of metro Atlanta do. The whole area for about a month in 1864 was one gigantic war zone. "Essentially everything from here up to Chattanooga was battlefield," he said.

That includes the low hill near the Moreland exit, and hundreds of other places where the two armies fought around Atlanta. Under the earth, evidence of the fighting survives. Douglas Scott, an archaeology professor in Nebraska nationally known as one of the pioneers in battlefield archaeology, said this technological transformation of archaeology "really has exploded, pun intended, in the last three or four years."

He said battlefield archaeologists in Europe, the eastern United States and the West have started using these tools, and now the South is embracing them. He said historical accounts, just like eyewitness testimony in a criminal case, couldn't always be trusted. "There's a precision that goes with finding stuff on the ground," he said. "Think of historians as detectives; these tools help us find the forensic evidence."

Text Source: U S News and World Report Science

Image Sources:
First: Integrated Solutions for GIS
Second: Global Positioning device at Williamsburg, VA
Third: ground penetrating radar
Fourth: Metal Detecting on Historical Sites

Museum of Underwater Archaeology: The CSS Alabama's Museum on the Internet

Because the CSS Alabama lies in 200 feet of high current water off the French coast of Normandy, the celebrated Confederate commerce raider may never be accessible to the general public. Museum exhibits display artifacts recovered from the wreck but visiting them requires physical travel. We invite you to journey via computer back through time to the coast of France to the CSS Alabama and be a part of the Franco-American archaeological investigation of Captain Raphael Semmes' most famous ship. Climb aboard CSS Alabama in its search for Union merchant vessels and its final battle with the USS Kearsarge. From the comfort of home, you can see images from the recovery of both information and artifacts without the dangers of diving in cold, deep water. You can also examine some of the recovered and preserved artifacts. I hope you will enjoy a virtual visit as much as I have enjoyed the opportunity and privilege of being aboard one of the most famous ships of the American War Between the States. (Dr. Gordon Watts, Musuem of Underwater Archaeology)

England's textile industry relied heavily on Southern cotton and England was a quiet supporter of the C.S.A. Since it violated international laws of neutrality for England to build warships for the Confederate cause, England simply constructed the ships but had them armed in other locations. After leaving England, the CSS Alabama was commissioned and outfitted for combat by the Confederate navy in the Azores. The Alabama attracted attention even during her construction. Union spy reports trace the ship designated "290" from her days in the building dock through six months of her sea voyages. Information about the ship's dimensions, manpower, and armaments was gleaned from workers around the ships and even from the sailors themselves. "Met the seamen, say thirty in number, on Saturday (July 26, 1862) coming down Canning Street from the ship, playing "Dixie's Land".... Went up to one of the men and asked him when he thought the ship would be going out. He told me that their bed clothes and bedding were on board and that the boatswain had told those who intended to go in her, to hold themselves in readiness for early next week."

Raphael Semmes, who had served in the United States Navy during the Mexican War, was appointed to the post of Commander of the Confederate Navy in 1861. His first action for the C.S.A. Navy was to command the CSS Sumter, a New Orleans steamer-turned-cruiser that began Semmes' reign of the high seas. After six months aboard CSS Sumter, Semmes was promoted to the rank of Captain and sent to England to command the new cruiser Alabama. The following proceedings marked a change in maritime custom, noting that the Alabama would burn one ship and lie in wait to capture any would-be rescuing ships. The sight of a burning ship could no longer be considered a call to aid but a signal to steer clear of potential pirates. "...in view of this atrocity (the burning of the Union ship Brilliant), it is the duty of this chamber to announce, for the information of all who are interested in the safety of human life--the life of ship-wrecked passengers and crews--that henceforth the light of a burning ship at sea will become to the American sailor the signal that lures to destruction; and will not be, as in times past, the beacon to guide the generous and intrepid mariner to the rescue of the unfortunate."

The CSS Alabama exhibit you are able to view at the virtual Mueseum of Underwater Archaeology is a new version of the exhibit launched early in 2006. It was redesigned to using cascading style sheets, and to be more accessible to individuals with disibilities. This virutal exhibit was designed and created by T. Kurt Knoerl and Michelle Damian. The exhibit script was based on the seasonal field reports written by Dr. Gordon Watts and was edited and arranged by Danielle Flores, Michelle Damian, and T Kurt Knoerl.

The above images and text are found at the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, CSS Alabama Exhibit

News---Antietam's Cornfield Yields Grave of New York Soldier

Union Soldier's Remains Found at Antietam, Linda Wheeler, Washington Post, December 28, 2008.

The soldier was just a teenager. Somewhere in New York state, he had signed up to fight for the Union. The band was playing on the day he marched away from home, headed South to to kill those rebels. Everyone said it would be a short war. He'd be home in no time. All of that ended on Sept. 17, 1862 at Antietam when he and his comrades were crossing a farmer's field. A bullet or piece of shrapnel found him. He sagged to the ground and was dead. His buddies moved on; they had to. The fighting was intense. By the end of the day, the battle considered the bloodiest of the war would end with 23,000 casualties.

The next day, under a flag of truce, a Union burial detail began its grim work. Sometime in the next week, the New Yorker was put in a shallow grave near where he fell, but away from the the farmer's plow. He was buried near a limestone outcropping that rippled just above the surface. This was temporary. Either his family or the government would move him to a cemetery and give him a proper burial. No one ever came for him. His grave was overlooked when the Union dead were gathered and moved to the new Antietam National Cemetery, dedicated exactly five years after the battle.

For 146 seasons, crops were planted all around him and even over him if a farmer could make the tight turn at the rocky place, but nothing disturbed his sleep. He could have been there forever, never found and never known except for a ground hog who happened to build a tunnel at that spot. The tunnel was deep, angling down under the limestone. At some point, the tunnel became clogged with debris and the ground hog vigorously kicked it out of the way, flinging it all the way to the surface. It included pieces of tea-colored bone. A visitor who was walking the battlefield in mid-October,strayed off the Corn Field Trail and saw some bones on the ground that he later left at the visitors' center. He didn't give his name, saying only he had found something in a field off the trail, next to an animal hole.

"It was a jaw bone with four teeth attached and one loose plus some other fragments," said Ed Wenschhof Jr., Antietam's chief of Natural Resources Management and Resources Protection. "We get a lot of these bones brought in here, almost all of them are animal." He needed to check it out. Several photographs were emailed to the National Park Service's regional archaeologist, Stephen Potter, in Washington. Potter said he knew right away the jaw, and what turned out to be skull fragments, belonged to a human. And he knew they were very old bones.

"When I realized what I had -- an unmarked, unknown burial of a Civil War soldier, not a victim of modern mayhem -- it grabbed me in the gut," he said. "I was totally focused. I forgot everything else. I immediately started planning what we would do next." He said he estimated the soldier's age at 19 to 21, based on an impacted wisdom tooth in the jaw bone, the lack of wear on the teeth and an open suture in the cranium. That suture closes only when an individual ceases to grow. He called Wenschhof. Potter wanted to see the the bones but his first impulse was to collect whatever else was out there in the field. It was going to be difficult to find the spot. The field covered acres of land, but they had to move quickly because relic hunters might hear about the discovery and disturb the grave.

Wenschhof and a team of park rangers crisscrossed the field that was adjacent to the infamous Corn Field, where brutal hand-to-hand fighting had taken place during the battle. There were burrows everywhere, and they had to be careful not to step in to them. Finally, one of the team found bone fragments and several pieces of leather outside a ground hog hole. It had to be the right place. The soldier had been found. Potter had sent the photographs to Douglas Owsley, a well-known forensic anthropologist with the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. He agreed with Potter's assessment but felt the soldier was somewhere between 18 and 21 and most likely was a teenager.

"He said the kid never saw his 20th birthday," Potter recalled. Within a few weeks, Potter and a crew were at Antietam, also known as Sharpsburg, scraping away the top layer of brown earth and then delving into the reddish layer of clay. They were working under a blue and white tent erected to shield themselves from the rain and wind and to protect whatever they found. Two animal holes were within the the rectangle sketched on the earth, probably boundaries of the grave. The resident of the burrow had been captured a few days earlier and delivered to a new neighborhood beyond the field.

The excavation work was slow. There weren't any large bones in the grave shaft. "Ground hogs can do a lot of damage," Potter said. "Context means everything. if the bones are moved or damaged or if the ground hog gnawed on them, and ground hogs do gnaw on bones -- they need their daily calcium supplement -- things can be hard to figure out." In this case, the ground hog had destroyed most of the soldier's bones.

What they did find was a number of jacket or coat buttons that connected the soldier to a New York regiment. The ones from the cuffs had the state emblem and some of the larger ones from the front had the emblem and the Latin word, "Excelsior," meaning upward. The other buttons found were general government issue, indicating the soldier was not a green recruit but a veteran who had been around long enough to have replaced lost buttons. They also found a belt buckle with "U.S." engraved on it, and some bits of leather later identified as coming from boots or shoes.

Potter told the crew, "We now know three things: our soldier was a young guy, probably a teenager, but he was a veteran and not a new recruit and he was part of a New York regiment." The crew, having plotted the exact position on paper of every bit of metal and bone and leather taken from the grave site, filled the 18-inch-deep excavation and tried to make it look like just another part of the farmer's field. The next step is for Owsley to examine all the bones and items found in the grave to see if he can tease any more information from them. He won't be able to do that for several months.

John Howard, Antietam battlefield superintendent, had been following the progress of the search closely. He had come out to watch the crews excavating the grave. Later he said it was unlikely the solider would ever be identified because so little was known about him and, on the day of the battle, there were many New York regiments involved. One of the rangers who works for Howard, Brian S. Baracz, has studied the battle for 10 years. He said there had been 68 infantry regiments, 12 artillery and seven cavalry units from New York at Antietam. Close to the area where the soldier was found, two dozen New York infantry regiments had crossed through. Using just those 24 units and narrowing the list of possible soldiers to those of the right age who were listed as "missing," he said the number would range between 25 and 50.

Howard said if they ever got "really lucky and identified the soldier, we'd make a real effort to track down the next of kin. We'd ask them what they wanted us to do. We could ship the remains or give him a proper burial here at Antietam." If there is no identification, he expects the soldier will be buried in the New York section of the national cemetery, which is near his office. "Just like any other American soldier, we will give him a proper burial," he said. "This is where he fought. This is where he died. This is now his home."

Text, Top and Middle Images Source: Washington Post, December 26, 2008

Bottom Image Source: Through the Cornfield, Keith Rocco. Keith Rocco is among the very best artists working in the field of American Civil War and Napoleonic Era painting. He as two published collections of his work, On Campaign: The Civil War Art of Keith Rocco, and The Soldier's View: The Civil War Art of Keith Rocco