Ministers National Battlefield park. A 5000 acre park. Mr. Bias has a masters degree in applied anthropology. As you imagine, he might has a long career in the National Park service. He was a legislative coordinator for the National Park service. He was project manager for the rehabilitation of arlington house. He worked at the National Battlefield, George Washington memorial parkway, Great Falls Park and hes going to be, as you just heard, the topic of his top today is unprecedented discovery. Field hospital barrios on earth. Please welcome mr. Bies. Okay, well im really looking forward to sharing this unprecedented story with everyone here. Again, i have the great privilege and early humble privilege of being the superintendent of 5000 acres of some of americas most hallowed grounds. Most everybody here is going to know this, but i feel 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. Of course, the first large scale battle of the American Civil War in july of 1861. That is followed by 13 months later, the second battle of manassas, or bull run. It was much larger, and i would say largely overlooked by the first battle. But between these two battles, about 4000 men died. And tens of thousands were wounded. Those are some pretty powerful statistics, but today we are going to dive in a little bit more beyond the statistics. We are going to look at what happened to some of these poor unfortunate soldiers who were either killed or horrific remained during those battles. As well as the stories of those who try to save them. And so i come to this with a relatively, i guess, unique perspective. Again, im the superintendent, i like to make all those fun superintendent decisions dealing with how we tell the story, the interpretation of the story. What the disposition of the human remains. What we do with these remains of American Service members. But i also come to it as an archaeologists. Again, i started my career as an archaeologists in the park service. And although i was doing, at the time this discovery was made, it was long before i came to become superintendent. I was actually doing Congressional Affairs on capitol hill, dressed much like this minus the furlough beard. I got a call that there was some really import stuff going on out in manassas. Because of my background, they asked if i could come and lend a hand. Of course i wanted to. So i come with the perspective, not only is the superintendent, but as someone who was actually there working on these excavations. So with that, im going to move on to a quick im just going to write jump right in. Im just going to give you the two minute version first of this unprecedented discovery and let you meet some of the people involved in it. Some of the phenomenal Smithsonian Institution scientists that we got to work with. Trying to discover a little more information about the soldiers. I will step aside and show you in about two minute video. I think we practiced this, i think its going to work, and then we will jump into the details. Its not metallic, see . Thats a kind of would. 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 those surgeons had to make when they realized that they were left and supplies were not coming in. They basically had to fend for themselves along with thousands of wounded. Because of the research that has been done, we can start to have a personal side, a personal connection, to these soldiers and these remains. So instead of some bones, you are looking at somebody who was between 30 and 34 years old and was from the state of new york. That person may have had a wife. He may have had children. It makes it a much more personal story for us and for us to share. So its Pretty Amazing stuff. I apologize, some of that was a little jumpy, but you are going to see some pretty clear images coming up here. If i can get to the next slide. So first, some ground rules. A couple of things here. First of all, the questions are at the end. Dont ask where the battlefield is, because i cant tell you. I feel bad about that. But based off what im going to share, we still have a significant reason to believe that there are still remains, human remains, left on the ground of this site. These remains were found ten inches below the surface. And so we unfortunately, in National Parks and battlefields, have a potential concern of threats like looting and things like that. So we need to safeguard the exact location of where this was found. Secondly, you are going to see some Pretty Amazing images and pictures here of bones. We should just remember as we go through this that these are the 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 pick on facebook or Something Like that. We have to remember that this is a really serious subject and its important to talk about it in this context. So again, even im going to get pretty excited here telling you about the science, but lets not lose sight of the fact that these are american soldiers that we are talking about. So how did this happen . Nobody goes out trying to dig up dead bodies. That is frowned upon in the National Parks service. We have thousands and thousands of soldiers in all likelihood still buried in unmarked graves across the battlefield in this country. So we actually go to Great Lengths to try to avoid disturbing these sites. So archeology is very important in National Parks. Well in this case, the National Park service needed to install a utility line at the battlefield. So we did what we always do, we brought in archaeologists and they did some initial checks. We did metal detector surveys and what we call shovel test pits, thats exactly what it sounds like. They checked it and they found some stuff here and there like you would expect in the battlefield context or a place where people have been living for hundreds of years. But they did not find anything of incredible significance. It just recommended that when you do the excavation, use a smaller blade as possible to put in this utility line. Just put a one foot wide backup blade which is what you are seeing in this bottom photograph. Make sure you have an archaeologists their on site monitoring, keeping an eye on what is coming out, just to make sure you do not hit anything unexpected. During the archeological testing, we found some of what you would expect at a battlefield and near places where there have been historic farmsteads and whatnot. You have glass and ceramics. Kind of your typical civil war period battle related artifacts. What obviously piqued the interest of the archaeologists, and this was going on i believe in october of 2014, was all of a sudden some of the backhoe scoops started depositing lots of very very very small fragments of bone. We are talking about things like the size of the head of an eraser or smaller. Very broken up pieces. The immediately stop and start collecting these. The assumption at the time was that the perhaps this was a single cow bell owner that had been churned up by plows or something. Obviously, everything was collected and taken back to our park service laboratory. At that lab, they started to look at it and said, you know, this looks like it could be human. And so we have a long relationship in National Parks, especially in the d. C. Area, with the Smithsonian Institution. For the last three decades, anytime human remains are 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 look at these. These folks, let me tell you, they are the leading forensic anthropologists in the country. They can do amazing work and just be able to have that as a resource to National Park services is really special. So they took the remains and they look at them and they started piecing these together. Again, we are talking tiny tiny bone fragments. When they did this, they were able to take these bones and tell us yes they are human. We think they represent at least four different individuals. And two of them have very clear cut marks on them. So you can see, this is an example right here. This is a human arm bone, the humorous. You can see these are the we are talking about something that is perhaps half an inch. I think this particular bone right here is in the neighborhood of 28 or 30 fragments that have been pieced together. Imagine the smithsonian doing that to 200 bone fragments and putting this puzzle back together. And so it was pretty clear to us that we were dealing with human remains from the battle. They had cut marks, so we are thinking, okay, this could be a pit from the battle. We did not know any more than that. But it was clearly battle related and this was pretty significant, because believe it or not, there has not been a single archeological excavated surgeons pit at any civil war battlefield. There has been one other that was in a secondary context in a major city where they were doing secondary amputations. But in terms of Field Hospitals, this is the only identified surgeons hit from the entire American Civil War, which is crazy, right . We read about thousands and thousands of amputations going on during the American Civil War. For one of these two have never been discovered before, or professionally excavated, is pretty significant. So the park service decided that we were going to go in. Again, this is prior to my time at the park, but we decided we need to figure out what is going on here. Not with the intention of going in and digging up bones, but just figure out what we are dealing with. Because if we are doing future development in this part of the park, we dont want to accidentally run across this again. So the idea is to go in, find it, excavate down, documented and then covered backup. Just so that we would know it was there, but we had some sense of what was going on. So the park service brought in some park archaeologists as well as some contractors. We had this Team Together for five days in october of 2015 to do this field work. Archeology goes for the first three days, they didnt find squat. It was on the fourth day that they started to find things. It became pretty apparent that this was not just a limb pit. You can see in this photograph on the left, right down here is that trench. This is the utility trench right here. You can see these two skeletons are missing their feet. Their feet were disturbed by the trench. And the excavations actually did start down here. So at first the thinking was, here is some amputated legs next to each other. But then, as you can see, the legs turned into a pelvis and its pretty clear that we were dealing with more than just amputations at this point. It was also very clear that we were dealing with individuals who had significant trauma. We will get into this later. But you can obviously see a very severe break of the right femur of this individual right here. This picture over here, again, you have these legs of the soldiers. You can see a button right here. This is a pile of amputated feet right over here right next to this one individual. And so, again, it became clear that we were dealing with much more than just amputated limbs. And so over the course of about a day and a half, because that is all the time we have, we very quickly exposed what we could. You will see a lot of photographs of the smithsonian staff here documenting this. Its actually easier to really do your documentation in terms of these detailed measurements, while the remains are still in the ground. These measurements are really important. They help scientists determine if they are male or female. Are they caucasian or African American . How tall are they . How old are they . These soils, because of how shallow this was in the type of soils we were dealing with, the preservation was very very poor. This is not like the stuff that andrew was talking about in the k role where you had amazing preservation of artifacts. These bones were close to crumbling. So the concern was, if they were removed from the ground, we might start to lose some of those details. So a lot of measurements were done in the field. And about that time, my predecessor, the former superintendent and the smithsonian folks got together, as well as the regional archaeologists from the park service. They decided we are going to remove these remains from the ground. Again, that is not something we typically do. That is not what he 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 have already been exposed to oxygen and whatnot, that in all likelihood within five years, these remains will simply disintegrate and go away. So the decision was made that anything that had been excavated to this point, and you can see theres quite a bit 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 would figure out what we were going to do with them. So this enters into the lab side of things. What are we dealing with . How many people were we dealing with . And so again, we had some fantastic work with the smithsonian, who more or less did most of this analysis that we are talking about for free. With that, im going to move on to what we have learned about these burials. First of all, we have to nearly complete soldiers. One of them was actually missing his entire skull. And initially, our thinking was that it could be a battle related injury. However, it became clear that that skull had actually been carried away by a plow at some point. That was because some of those teeth were found, but the skull was gone. So we had nearly two complete sets of soldiers and then we had 11 amputated limbs. Ten legs and one arm. So what have weve been able to learn about these individuals . So burial one, which was the soldier you saw on your left hand side with the one kind of severe leg injury. Burial one was between 25 and 29 years old. Again, the scientists can tell that by the way the bones are formed. We know he was likely from upstate new york or new england. So how do we figure that out . It is Pretty Amazing stuff. Im not going to pretend, i mean archaeologists, im not a chemist. So i will not pretend to explain exactly how this works. They do this fascinating stuff called isotopes analysis. This was technology that wasnt even really around until ten or 15 years ago. When they basically do is they take a very small fragment of bone and grinded up. By shooting lasers at it and all kinds of neat scientific stuff, they can tell where that individual drank their Drinking Water when their bones were being formed as a kid and teenager. There are isotopes maps for the entire world which were based on probability, you can figure out where somebody drank their Drinking Water when their bones were being formed. In the case of this soldier, and i will jump to the chase, all of these soldiers, they were all very clearly drinking yankee water as their bones were being formed. There was one exception, and theres one good likelihood that he came from ireland. All the others were probably from the new york or new england area. Burial one was also about five foot seven and he had a fairly muscular build. Again, it is amazing that we can tell this. It wasnt just some scrawny guy like me. The way his bones had formed, his muscles, they can tell how they attached and how thick the muscles were. He wasnt stocky, but he was a really wellbuilt muscular guy. He was not wearing any discernible clothing. We think that he was essentially stripped of his clothes before he was buried. This leads into some of our theories about this hospital and when it was and the fact that these may have been soldiers, certainly who made it to a Field Hospital alive, but also may have laid there for several days before they died. The only thing that we found on this one soldier was a brass eyelet around his neck, which could have been a grommets or something from a gun blanket. A civil war charge they would have wrapped the body in, but it really is unclear. There certainly could have been bone buttons, oyster shell buttons for underwear or an undershirt. But because of the soil conditions, we found no trace of these. I mentioned part of the pell this were highly disturbed because these were only ten inches down. After the war, it had been applied feel for the next 100 years. But a very important clue here was the bullet that was launched in his body. So why are these clues important . Why is it important . First of all, i mentioned manassas. You had to battles. We did not even know going into this, based on the location where this was discovered, if these were remains from the first battle for second battle. This bullet is really significant. This soldier had 8. 5 seven seven caliber british infield bullet lodged in his femur. Showing the bullet as well some of this work was. A dual micro ct scan. So were super duper scouts can. They can scan every single bone and put them take them apart, put them back together again and fell out all kinds of things about the wound and how it was suffered. They discovered something rather significant unit i would never know this by looking at. It but they could tell that by the way the bone broke, that the soldier was buried bearing 100 percent of his weight and maybe then some on his right leg when he sustain this wound. So in a likelihood, he was running when he was shot in essentially the rear end. Its amazing that they could tell this, but they can tell that is in front tire force of his body was on his right l