The Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut hosted an international conference for scholars of military archaeology over the weekend. Among other speakers, the audience heard from the man who found the wreck of the Titanic.
Robert Ballard, professor at the University of Rhode Island, was the conference’s keynote speaker. Ballard found a score of other wrecks aside from the Titanic, including the Yorktown and PT-109. Ballard says some of the most exciting military history can actually be found underwater.
“The deep sea is the largest museum on Earth. And also, the deeper you go, the more preserved things are – a shipwreck we just recently found in the Black Sea from 300 B.C. has human remains on it. Now that’s quite amazing.”
Most presentations hewed to land, from ancient Rome and the Napoleonic Wars to the modern Middle East. Dr. Ashley Bissonnette, one of the organizers, says, “Battlefield archaeology could be looking at fortifications, it could be looking at lines of fire. This could be ancient to present time. We have people who presented on World War I, World War II. Pretty much any battlefield you can think of around the world.”
She says the conference tried to dedicate more time to indigenous perspectives – appropriate to the conference’s setting at a museum of Native American history.
“Having that other side of history come out that’s not usually represented. Usually we don’t get that indigenous perspective.”
The conference drew hundreds of scholars from 17 different countries. Organizers say it was the largest military archaeology conference ever held in the U.S.
