It seems a shame that perhaps over a controversial scholar in
Anthropology, Stanislav Andreski, ("Military Organization and Society"
U. of California Press, 1971 with a forward by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown)
that this type of study isn't offered in the United States, though
there have been some battlefield archaeology studies. The extent of
anthropology at Antietam battlefield, in my experience, was to know
the Maryland flint knapper who knapped grey Texas chert into gun
flints to be sold by the National Parks Service (NPS) as "souvenirs"
for $.50 (the knapper got 2 bits, half that) to perhaps discourage
digging on the site. Perhaps the avoidance has developed over the guns
fired at Fort Sumter at the beginning of the American Civil War, said
to have been by an artillery student at his former professor of
artillery, then in charge of the fort, with whom he was know to
quarrel with, back at the West Point Military Academy. Many of the
battlefields are disappearing at an alarming rate to development and
should have a learned archaeological assessment at the very least
before transformed by modern development.

As an archaeological researcher of the "Swamp Angel" a large gun fired
at Charleston, SC, findings its prototype in Cold Spring, NY, site of
the "West Point Foundry" a manufacturer of the R.P. Parrott patented
rifled cannon during the American Civil War that turned its tide to
the North arguably (the sinking of the CSS Alabama off Cherbourg,
France with one, and various other engagements, the siege of Atlanta,
etc.) whose records in Washington D.C., according to the primary
industrial archaeologist researcher Edward Rutsch, are still
"classified" I feel that many of the sites we do get to understand may
lose their significance, if we lose their connection with the various
battles fought nearby. Perhaps America's "military-industrial complex"
(which I would add education to that, but we don't double hyphenate,
without it becoming satire) should be studied better. After all they
handed a Hudson River iron founder some brochures from the Crystal
Palace exhibition, he created a "powder mill: outside Atlanta, GA that
if General Sherman had found, might have stopped the war a year
earlier according to some historians, and perhaps, that "march to the
sea" might never had happened.

George Myers
Just some reactions to this great program in Glasgow, Scotland.