Bones. This top was part of a daylong seminar cohosted by Longwood University in from 10, virginia, and appomattox courthouse National Historical park. Alright, our last speaker for the day is mr. Brandon buys, superintendent of appomattox National Historical park. He has a masters degree in applied anthropology, and as you mentioned, a long career in the National Park service. He was legislative coordinator for the National Capital region of the National Park service, project manager for the rehabilitation of arlington house, worked on the George Washington memorial parkway, and he will be, as you just heard, the topic of his talk today is the unprecedented discovery of Field Hospital burials unearthed and Appomattox National park. I really looking forward to sharing this unprecedented story with everyone here. Again, i have been great privilege and humble privilege of being the superintendent of 5000 acres of some of americas most hallowed grounds. I feel that to give the obligatory 30 seconds of why Manassas Battlefield is an important place, we preserve the scenes of not just one but two incredibly significant civil war battles. The first largescale battle of the American Civil War of july 1861, followed by just 13 months later, the second battle of manassas, bull run, which is much larger camera actually overlooks compared to the first battle. Between these two battles, about 4000 men died. And tens of thousands were wounded. Those are some pretty powerful statistics. Today, we will dive in a little more beyond the statistics and look at what happened to some of these poor, unfortunate soldiers were either killed or horrifically maimed in those battles, as well as the stories of those who try to save them. I come to this with a relatively unique perspective. Again, i am the superintendent, so i get to make all those fun, superintendent decisions on how we tell the story, the interpretation of the story, the disposition of the remains of a what do we do with the remains of the American Service members . But i also come to it as an archaeologist. I started my career as an archaeologist with the National Park service. The time the discovery was made was long before i became superintendent, i was actually doing Congressional Affairs on capitol hill dressed much like this without the beard. I got the call that there was some really important going on in manassas and because my background, they asked if i wanted to lend a hand. Of course, i wanted to. Side come at this so i was actually they are working on the excavations. With that, i will move on to a quick i will just jump right in people like to build suspense, i will just give you the two minute version first of the discovery and let you meet some of the people involved in it and some of the phenomenal Smithsonian Institution scientists we were trying to work with, who were trying to discover new information about the soldiers. I will show you a two minute video, and that will jump in with the details. music this is a project that was so illuminating in terms of what it can tell us about events at Manassas Battlefield, the lives of these men, who they are, and also a story of the surgeons who tried to help them. There is a lot of choices that the surgeons had to make when they realized that they were left and supplies were not coming in, and they basically had to fend for themselves along with thousands of wounded. music because of the research that has been done, we can start to have a personal side, if personal connection to these soldiers and these remains. So instead of loans, you bones, you are looking of someone who was 3034 years old and was from new york. That person may have had a wife and children. It makes it a much more personal story for us to share. music brandon so it is Pretty Amazing stuff. I apologize, some of that was jumpy, but you will see some pretty clear images coming here. First, some ground rules. First of all, questions at the end, do not ask where in the battlefield we found these, because i cannot tell you. I feel bad about that. Based on what i am going to share, we still have significant reason to believe there are still Human Remains Found on the grounds. These remains were found 10 inches below the surface. So we unfortunately, in National Parks and battlefields, have a concern about potential threats looming. So we need to safeguard the exact location where this was found. Secondly, you are going to see some Pretty Amazing images, some pictures of bones. Just remember as we go through this that these are remains of American Service members some of which their families never knew what happened to them. Dont zoom in with your phones and make it your profile pic on facebook or Something Like that, we have to remember that this is a really serious subject. And it is important to talk about it in that context. Even i am going to get excited telling you about the science, but let us not lose sight of the fact that these are american soldiers were talking about. So, how did this happen . At the National Park service, nobody goes out trying to dig up bodies. That is found upon. We have thousands of thousands of soldiers in all likelihood still buried in unmarked graves across battlefields in this country. So we go to Great Lengths to try to avoid disturbing the sites. Archaeology is very important in National Parks. In this case, the National Park service needed to install a utility line of the battlefield. So we did what we always do, we brought in archaeologists. They did initial checks, metal detector surveys, shovel test pits, exactly what it sounds like, and they checked it. They found some stuff here and there like you would expect in a battlefield context. But they did not find anything of incredible significance, they just recommended, when you do the excavation, use a small a blade as possible to put in the utility line, use a one foot wide blade, which is why youre seeing here in this bottom photographs, and make sure you have an archaeologist monitoring, keeping an eye on what is coming out. During the archaeological testing and the monitoring we found what you would expec at a battlefield, in places where there have been historic farms, glass, ceramics, your typical civil war period battlerelated artifacts. But what obviously piqued the interests of the archaeologist, and this was in october of 2014, was that all of a sudden, some of the backhoe scoops started depositing lots of very, very small fragments of bones, they had to have been the size of an eraser or smaller, very broken up pieces. They immediately stopped and started collecting these. The assumption at the time was maybe this was just a single cow bone or something that had been chopped up by plows or something. Everything was collected and taken to our park service laboratory. They park service laboratory. They started to look at it and said, this looks like it could be human. We have a long relationship in National Parks especially in the d. C. Area with the Smithsonian Institution. For the last three decades, every time human remains were found in any park, not just battlefields in the immediate d. C. Maryland virginia area, our partners at the smithsonian have been very generous to help look at this. They are these leading forensic anthropologists in the country. They can do amazing work. To be able to have that as a resource has been really special. So they took the remains and they looked at them. And they started piecing these together. Again, we are talking tiny bone fragments. When they did this, they were able to take these bonds and tell us, yes, they are human, and we think they represent at least four different individuals, and two of them have very clear cut marks on them. You can see, this is an example, this is a human arm bone, a humerus, something that is maybe a half inch. This particular bone here is somewhere in the neighborhood of 28 or 30 fragments that have been pieced together. Imagine the smithsonian doing that to a 200 bone fragments and putting this puzzle back together. It was pretty clear that we were dealing with human remains from the battle. And they have cut marks. So we were thinking, ok, this could be a limb pit from the battle. This was pretty significant because believe it or not, there has not been a single archaeologically excavated surgeons pit or limb pit as committed from a civil war excavated from a civil war battle. In terms of Field Hospital, this is the only identified surgeons pit from a civil war battle. So this is pretty significant. The park service decided that we were going to go in, and this was prior to my time at the park, but we decided we needed to figure out what was going on here. Not with the intention of digging up bones, but to just go down and see if we could figure out what we were dealing with, because if we were doing future development in this part of the park, we dont want to accidentally run across this again. So the idea was to go in, excavate down, documented, then cover it back up, so we would know. It was there so the park service brought in archaeologists and contractors, and we had the Team Together for five days in october of 2015 to do the work. As archaeology usually goes, for the first three days, they didnt find squat. On the fourth day is when they started to find things. And if it came pretty apparent that this was not just a little bit and limba limb pit. This is the utility trench dressed here you can see that this is a utility trench right here. The excavation started down here, and a first the thinking was, oh, here are some amputated legs next to each other. But as you can see, the legs turned into a pelvis. It was pretty clear that we were dealing with more than just amputations. It was clear we were dealing with individuals who had significant trauma. We will get into this later, but you can see a severe break of the right femur of this individual here. This picture here, again, you can see the legs, you can see a button. This is a pile of amputated feet next to this one individual. Again, it became clear that we were dealing with much more than just amputated limbs. Over the course of a day and a half, that was all the time we had, we very quickly exposed what we could. You will see a lot of photographs of the smithsonian staff documenting this. It is actually easier to to your documentation in terms of detailed measurements, while the remains are still in the ground. The measurements are really important. They help scientists determine, are they mail, are they female, are they caucasian or africanamerican . How tall are they . How old are they . Because of how shallow this was, and the type of soil we were dealing with, preservation was very poor. This is not like the stuff. Ed was talking about where you had amazing preservation of artifacts. These remains were close to crumbling. The concern was that if they were removed from the ground, we would start to lose the. Details so a lot of measurements were done on the field. At that time, may predecessor, the former superintendent, and the smithsonian folks got together with her archaeologists and decided, we will remove these remains from the ground. That is not what they intended to do in this case, but the thinking was, if we simply just put dirt back on top of this, these are so shallow and they have already been exposed to oxygen and whatnot. Very likely in five years, the remains would simply disintegrate and go away. So anything that had been excavated at this point, you can see, there is credited over here that has not been excavated, everything that was excavated was going to be removed from the ground and taken away for study, then we were going to figure out what we were going to do with it. This enters into the lab side of things. What are we dealing with . How many people are we dealing with . So, again, fantastic work with the smithsonian, who did this analysis for free. With that, i will move on to what we have learned about these burials. First of all, we have two nearly complete soldiers. One of them was actually missing his entire skull. Initially our thinking was that it could be a battle related injury, but it became clear that the skull had been carried away by a lower at disintegrate and go away. So anything that had been excavated at this point, you can see, there is credited over here that has not been excavated, everything that was excavated was going to be removed from the ground and taken away for study, then we were going to figure out what we were going to do with it. This enters into the lab side of things. What are we dealing with . How many people are we dealing with . So, again, fantastic work with the smithsonian, who did this analysis for free. With that, i will move on to what we have learned about these burials. First of all, we have two nearly complete soldiers. One of them was actually missing his entire skull. Initially our thinking was that it could be a battle related injury, but it became clear that the skull had been carried away by a lower at some point because some of his teas were found, but the skull was gone. Two nearly complete sets of soldiers. And we have 11 amputated limbs, 10 legs and one arm. What have we been able to learn about these individuals . The burial 1, the soldier with the severe leg injury, we know that he was about 25 and 21 to nine years old. They can tell that by the way the bones were formed. He was likely from upstate new york or new england. How did we figure that out . I am an archaeologist, im not a chemist, so i will not pretend to explain exactly how this works. They did this fascinating stuff called isotope analysis. Technology that wasnt even around until 10 or 15 years ago. Basically what they do is take a very small fragment of own and grind it up and by shooting lasers added and all kinds of neat, scientific stuff, they can tell where that individual drank their Drinking Water when their bones are being formed as a kid and as a teenager. And there are isotope maps for the entire world where based on probability, you can figure out where someone drank their Drinking Water when their bones were being formed. I will jump to the chase, all these soldiers were all very clearly drinking inky water as their bones are being formed, with one exception drinking yankee water as their bones were being formed. Burial 1 was also about 57 and he had a fairly muscular build. It is amazing that we can tell this, that he wasnt just some scrawny guy like me. The way his bones were formed, his muscles, they can tell how they attached cover how thick the muscles were. He wasnt stocky but he was a really wild held muscular guy. He was not wearing any he was a really wellbuilt, muscular guy. We think he was stripped of his clothes before being. This leaves into our theories about this hospital and where it was coming and about the fact that there may have been soldiers who made it to the Field Hospital alive and also may have laid there for several days before they died. The only thing we found on this one soldier was a brass around his neck that could have been a civil war tarp and that they wrapped the body in, but it is really not clear. It could have been buttons for underwear or an undershirt, but because of soil conditions, we found no trace of these. I mentioned the bottom point, the portion of the body, parts of the skull and pelvis were disturbed. This had been a plot field after the war a plowed field. That was clear was a bullet lodged in his body. Where these clues important . First of all, as a mentioned, manassas. You had union and confederate, but you had two battles. We didnt know going into this if these were remains from the first battle or from the second battle. This bullet is really significant. The soldier had a. 577 caliber british enfield bullet lodged in his femur. I will step away for a quick second, the soldier was shot read about here. The bullet would have entered. Right about here. He