University of New Orleans Archaeological Research and Curation (UNO ARC) is pleased to announce the launch of its latest partner project with the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), intended to help fulfill the agency’s mission of achieving the fullest possible accounting of American service personnel missing in action. Prof. D. Ryan Gray will lead a group of students and archaeologists from the University of New Orleans, soon to be LSU New Orleans, in an investigation of a location believed to be associated with a World War II-era aircraft crash and the loss of an American pilot in central Italy. The team will join longtime colleague Prof. Harald Stadler and archaeologists affiliated with the University of Innsbruck and the Archäologische Forschungsgruppe Osttirol in Austria on the project. The excavation will mark the team’s first project in Italy and its seventh recovery mission with the DPAA.

The UNO team will incorporate several additional contributors to the mission. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans plans to send three members of the museum’s Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy to the excavation in Italy. Erica Lansberg, the DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the museum, along with Historical Research Services team members Rebecca Poole and Stephen Batemen, will contribute their expertise in World War II history to the excavation efforts. Professional archaeologists from Tamarix, a longtime Italian partner organization that continues to support DPAA activities in Italy, also will participate in the project.

The group will be further augmented by additional students from two institutions. This summer, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is leading an ROTC initiative that will send teams of cadets and midshipmen to MIA recovery missions in four countries. The initiative aims to create a permanent annual summer training partnership with each service branch, providing future military officers with a developmental experience while assisting in the mission of bringing missing service members home. A group of cadets from Tulane will join the excavation through the initiative. Building on the success of last summer’s excavations at Duncan Plaza in New Orleans, a group of students and archaeologists from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, led by Dr. Jim Parker, executive director of the Michael and Sara Moskau Institute of Archaeology, also will contribute to the project.

The project was developed as a public-private partnership with the DPAA to further the agency’s mission to locate, recover, identify and return U.S. personnel still unaccounted for from previous wars and conflicts. UNO’s first partner project with the DPAA in 2017 resulted in the recovery and identification of the remains of Capt. Lawrence Dickson, the first of 27 missing Tuskegee Airmen from World War II to be recovered. Another UNO mission in Germany resulted in the recovery and identification of two B-17 crew members, Tech. Sgt. William Leukering and Staff Sgt. Edgar Mills. The university believes all families deserve closure and the dignified treatment of their lost loved ones, and it is proud to partner with the DPAA to help ensure military personnel are returned for proper burial.