Figure 91 - uploaded by Toni Carrell
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U.S. Invasion Objectives at Peleliu. Top inset: Location of Landing Beaches in Palauan Archipelago. Bottom inset: Location of Landing Beaches on Peleliu Island. Image by Roth/Ships of Discovery Science Team.
Source publication
The focus of the project is the WWII battle for the island of Peleliu and the scattered material remains present in the submerged battlefield. The goal was to locate and photogrammetrically record sites, characterize coral growth and impacts, and to examine the reef substrate and its coral communities to determine if the scars from U.S. military bl...
Citations
... In the past decade, the field of conflict archaeology has moved from being a fringe aspect of heritage management to becoming a sub-discipline in its own right. Much of the work on conflict heritage of the 20th century focusses on a range of military installations and battlefields primarily associated with World War I [1][2][3] and World War II [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], as well as associated objects such as ships [12], aircraft [13,14], tanks [15], and gun installations [16,17]. There is also an extensive body of research that deals with submerged shipwrecks, both individual wrecks [18] and of groups of sunken vessels, either derived from single military operations [19][20][21] or as part of organized denial through scuttling [22]. ...
The Washington Arms Limitation Treaty 1922 was arguably one the most significant disarmament treaties of the first half of the 20th century. It can be shown that the heritage items associated with this treaty are still extant. Ship's bells are one of the few moveable objects that are specific to the operational life of a ship and are therefore highly symbolic in representing a vessel. This paper surveys which bells of the ships scrapped under conditions of the Washington Arms Limitation Treaty are known to exist. A typology of ship's bells has been developed to understand the nature of bell provisioning to vessels newly commissioned into the U.S. Navy. Each of the countries associated with the Washington Treaty have divergent disposal practices with respect to navy property, and this is reflected in both the prevalence and nature of custodianship of ship's bells from this period. Such procedures range from the U.S. requirement commanding all surplus Navy property to be deemed government property upon ship deactivation, to the British practice of vending ship's bells to private parties at public sales. However, ship's bells, like many obsolete functional items, can be regarded as iconic in terms of heritage and therefore warrant attention for future preservation and presentation in the public domain.
Cartagena de Indias was an important colonial port in the ‘New World’ and constituted a war-and-defence landscape during 17th and 18th centuries in the Colombian Caribbean. Accordingly, the 1741 English invasion of Cartagena presents a remarkable opportunity for studying coastal and naval defensive and offensive strategies and tactics, matters involving both natural and cultural elements. The battle began with 186 English ships and thousands of soldiers, sailors and slaves against a Spanish defence comprised of a small number of troops, fortifications of badly worn artillery and a few vessels. Despite their overwhelming advantages, the English lost the battle and retreated with huge material losses and thousands of casualties. Archaeological excavations carried out on shipwrecks and fortification remains in the Bocachica zone between 2007 and 2019 have collected and correlated a rich variety of land and underwater data on this naval battlefield and maritime cultural landscape. By applying multiple interpretative frameworks, we demonstrate that the vessels’ tactical moves, the troops and the arrangement of defensive and offensive systems were directly related to winds, sea currents, mangroves, mosquitoes and geomorphology. Throughout this analysis, the Key Terrain/Decisive Terrain; Observation and Fields of Fire; Concealment and Cover; Obstacles; and Avenues of Approach/Withdrawal (KOCOA) methodology is used to analyse the active relationship between the different human and non-human actors which shaped the battle.
