On the saratoga battlefield and in the lake george region and in the mohawk valley. Snow moved to Pennsylvania State university in 1995, where he served as head of the department of anthropology for the next 10 years. In 2005, he was a fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in washington, d. C. , the four returning to penn state as professor of anthropology. He served as president of the society for american archaeology from 2007 to 2009. He has also been closely involved with the development of digital antiquities, a Cyber Infrastructure program for the archiving of archaeological data, initiated with funding the Andrew Mellon foundation. He lives in pennsylvania with his wife of 52 years. Dr. Snow is accompanied hereby with her daughter, here by their daughter, who you may as kate snow. We welcome dr. Dean snow. [applause] dr. Snow thank you very much. Im delighted to be here tonight. I hope that i can get through this quickly so we can get to the question period, because i find that to be the most entertaining for me part of any presentation. I thought i would talk to you tonight about a number of things that i think would be of particular interest to people in this organization. This is [inaudible] the book has only been out for the best of a month. What i found out was that somebody at the printers didnt have anything to do with the people here that produced the book in new york city, but the printer apparently forgot to include the url of the companion website that goes with the book. I have some cards appear that have this web address on them, if you are interested in looking at that. Please come get one of those cards. Back behind, there are some additional copies of the card. Im eager for people to look at the website, because there are things there that are too expensive to put in any print version of a book. There are color maps, for example. The maps are interactive. If you are interested in the battle of saratoga, you can see where the troops were hourbyhour on the two days of fighting, in addition to the day following the second battle and 10 days later, when the british were surrounded in the Little Village of saratoga, which is now called schuylerville. I dont want anybody to miss being able to access that, since its not in the book, you wouldnt be able to find out about it otherwise. I wanted to talk tonight about a i wanted to talk tonight about a few specific subjects. How the book came to be written, particularly how it came to be written the way it was. Battlefield archaeology generally, in my experience as an archaeologist, how this book is different and how the armies were organized and some supplementary materials that i thought might be of interest to you, then finally a little discussion on the role of the militia, because the militia was very important in the American Revolution. How i got involved at saratoga began with a phone call from this gentleman. This is john cotter. At a time, he was a senior archaeologist in the park service and had his office in philadelphia. In 1972, he called me and said we really need you to help us out. We are getting ready for the american bicentennial. We are a little concerned about the saratoga battlefield, because we are not absolutely convinced that they have put the interpretive signs exactly where they ought to be. We dont want anyone to be misled about the nature of these battles. I was in my early 30s at the time. When he presented me with the notion that i should do the archaeology of an area that is over five square miles in size and he was going to give me 2500 to do this, i thought, why not . [laughter] when you are 32 years old, that kind of request is seen as a challenge rather than the Impossible Task that it that anybody with more sense would have thought it to be. Heres what the battlefield looks like today. The white Boundary Line is the modern the current boundary. Back in the 1970s, the park was slightly smaller. Its pretty much the same as you see it now. What they were interested in finding out more about was the location of the british fortifications and the location secondarily of where the american lines were in 1777. We had the benefit on the british side of some maps drawn by a british officer named William Wilkinson. He had the job of going around in the period between the two battles, when there was no fighting going on of any major at any major scale, but during which there was an awful lot of skirmishing going on, pickets being captured by patrols from both armies, desertions going on from time to time as people deserted the british army and came over to the american side, for the most part. His map is really very, very useful to us. And you can see over here whoops. The top button. Sorry. Over here, Major Construction of british fortifications at this far end of the british line. The right end from our perspective, the left flank of the line was resting on the hudson river. A mile or two away, off the bottom of this screen, where the american lines. They were, in effect, the mirror image of the british lines for the 32 days that there were people on this battlefield. Ok. The archaeological objectives then were to explore the redoubts the british had built. These were their major fortifications. In 1973, a year later, they gave us a new contract. We explored the great redoubt. I will come back to that and talk about what it was. The location of a house or the remains of it, called the taylor house, some exploration of the american lines. And then the following year, we looked more at the american lines and went back to some of the central british fortifications. The archaeological techniques that i would use if i were to go back and do this kind of project now would be these. Half of them were not available in 1971. We had maps from 1977. 1777. We were able to find an Airline Service that would fly low level aerial photographs, and we could do very precise and very extreme topographic maps. We had a magnetometer, but it was brandnew technology. You couldnt buy one, but you could rent one from the company that was developing it. Soil samplers and metal detector were also available. But Resistivity Survey was not applicable in this situation. Ground penetrating radar had not been invented yet. Portable computers give me a break. Nobody had a portable computer in 1971. Electronic surveying did not exist. Gps. Everybody has that in their cars now. It wasnt even dreamed of in 1971. So, what i had was an enthusiastic bunch of students. There was a lot more hair in those days. [laughter] this guy with a black hair is me with the black hair is me. The colors changed in those years, too. A number of the students went on to have careers in archaeology. One became a park ranger. Another ended up working in the new york state museum. My first doctoral student went on to have a significant career in teaching at suny oneonta. And so on. A number of these young people did very well in the years following. That was my crew. Now, lets take a look at the persona that were involved with the battle. We jumped one. Here we go. I dont know what happened to horatio, but hes not there. Lets try that again and see if he pops up. John burgoyne was a british commander at saratoga. It was his idea that he hatched out in 1775 while he was involved with the siege of boston battle of bunker hill, and the events in eastern massachusetts that were part of the early stages of this war he conceived of the notion of driving south from montreal and having other british troops move north from new york city, converging on albany. The idea was to split the new england colonies off from the other colonies, to separate the new englanders from the new yorkers and the pennsylvanians and the other people farther south. The idea was that the hotbed of the revolution was in new england, and if they could just keep those new englanders from influencing the rest of the colonials, maybe the loyalists in new york city and farther south would be able to be recruited to the british cause more effectively. So, it was a good idea. It was one shared by a number of others in the british army. It was the notion that burgoyne. As able to sell in london and then came back in 1777 to put it into effect. , whose picture the program chooses i can see it on my screen. You cant. He was a former british officer. He and burgoyne had been in the same outfit when they were young men and lieutenants. They had known each other in england. They were both part of what was the finest army in the world then. Gates had later realized that he didnt have much of a future in the british army has he could because he could not afford to buy the commission that would enable him to move up in the ranks. If you were a british soldier in those days, you had to buy a commission. You did not get there by merit. You got there by negotiating and by getting financial backing from someone. In the case of burgoyne, that financial backing came from what was originally a reluctant fatherinlaw. But once his wife had a baby girl, the fatherinlaw changed his attitude about this guys worth. He was known as gentleman johnny for a reason. He had a gambling habit. And he liked to party. He had to sell his commissioner his Commission Early on in order to get money to live on. It gives you some idea of what the terms of enlistment were in the british army. There were other people involved at saratoga that i should mention. Here are two of them. Thaddeus was a polish military man who had engineering experience and a lot of talent. He came over and presented himself to George Washington and said, i would like to help out. There were a number of these people who did this, lafayette being the most famous of them. Some of them very successful. Lafayette certainly was. But there were others who basically were just adventurers, looking for an interesting diversion out here in america. There was one with gates that i might have time to talk about later. Kosciuszko turned out to be talented and very serious. Washington said, well, all right, youre on. He didnt say youre hired, but because he didnt have anything to pay the guy. But he agreed to let kosciuszko help out the American Army. Kosciuszko came up to new york under the command of gates and eventually all the way up the hudson to the albany area. It was he who chose the location for the american lines up north of albany. It was he who decided where that Northern Army was going to make its stand was the right place to do it. It was the best ground. We also had Benedict Arnold, who, at the time, was very ambitious and had done fairly well. He had had a disastrous attempt on canada. We dont have time to talk about that tonight. But he had also proven himself worthy on lake champlain. He was well thought of at the time. Washington particularly liked Benedict Arnold as an officer. But arnold had a narcissistic personality. Hes the kind of person who would step into the vacuum and a time there was a lull in the conversation. He always had an opinion. He was sometimes wrong, but he was never in doubt. This eventually got him into a lot of trouble, as we will see. There are other books about saratoga. Here are two very good ones. I recommend them to you. These are books about the campaign. They start in canada. They finish up in saratoga county, but they cover the whole campaign. They cover it in detail. And because they cover it in that fashion, they are, like most general history books ive just finished one on antietam, for example told at 30,000 feet. They are very, very abstract, from the point of view of the people who were actually on the ground doing the fighting. They are very good books, but they are not the book that i was interested in writing. I thought i was going to do a book that involved the archaeology as much as the history, because the archaeology is what i was familiar with. That was what i was intending to do three years ago when i finally had the time to turn to writing the book that resulted from my work way back in the 1970s. But it turned out that another book was being prepared, and they asked me to write a chapter on the archaeology of the british fortifications, which is mostly what i had done in saratoga back in the 1970s, and i agreed, partly because it freed me from having to include too much archaeology. Its kind of a crazy thing for an archaeologist to say, i suppose, but thats how it worked out. I have a chapter in this book that came out earlier this year. It covers the archaeology and made it unnecessary for me to do that again in my own book. Another thing that happened was i had been reading and rereading this book for years. I discovered it decades ago. It is a book on gettysburg. I live not far from gettysburg now. Its a fascinating place. I love it, like a lot of americans do. Its a great place to visit. This book really tells you that story in a beautiful way, in an intimate, personal kind of way, and i thought, that sounds to me like the way to write a history book. But this is historical fiction. Its the book that ted turner chose when he decided he wanted to do a movie on gettysburg. This was the basis for the gettysburg movie, which a lot of people have seen. If you go to gettysburg, watch that movie the night before you go, and it makes it a much better experience when you get there. This is my personal copy. You can see that its pretty dogeared. I pull it off the shelf every once in a while and open it up at random and just read a few pages. Its that good. You can read any part of it just for a little while and its a very entertaining experience. The other thing that happened to me was that i was invited with my wife to a little garden party in may of 1995, and it was a goodbye party. It was a Going Away Party that a couple of friends threw for us. They invited two other couples. There were eight of us. Charlie and his wife and the women were off someplace else. The other two guys that were there were these two men. This is a picture from the schenectady gazette. That is the best picture i could find. This is his obituary photograph. But i did find this picture of fred sawada online. I had the experience of spending 20 minutes or a half hour standing there with a glass of wine in my hand while these two guys discovered that they had fought each other in world war ii. Dr. Mauet had lived down the street from me for a quarter of a century. I knew him slightly. But i just assumed he had come to the United States before the second world war, that he had gotten out of germany before things got bad. There was another local doctor that i had used professionally, i had gone to as a patient, who was that kind of german expatriate. He had escaped from germany, came here, and set up a practice. This guy, however, had been drafted into the german army and had been sent to the russian front. Fred sawadi, had grown , up in hawaii. He and his brother had volunteered for the Army Reserves in honolulu. When the war broke out, he was activated. The battalion was sent to europe. It was merged with the 442nd. That was the japaneseamerican int that was so important saving a lot of american lives during the battle of the bulge. Both ended up in the valley in northern italy. Fred was there as the american troops pushed north in italy. Rudolf was there because the russian front had collapsed and they were pulled back and reassigned to northern italy. As i stood there i discovered , these guys had actually fought each other. The thing about that conversation was that these men talked about the experience as if they had been both at the same football game. Its as if i was there last saturday night when penn state beat ohio state. Its the kind of conversation that i might have with an ohio state fan a year or two from now about that game. It was an amazing conversation. Ive never experienced anything quite like it. These guys talked about their experience in world war ii the way the world war ii vets that i knew growing up on the prairies of southern minnesota talked about their experience. The older they got, the more forthcoming they seemed to be. The sharp edges of the horrible experience these guys both went through in italy had been blunted over the years. Now they were talking about it as if it had been a soccer match or a football game. It was an amazing conversation. Talked about being a doctor in the german army. And working to keep the men in his care from being further wounded by evacuating them when the russians got too close. This guy talked about what it was like to be an american soldier. He turned to me and said, you know, the german army was really very good. [laughter] the Ohio State Football Team is very good, too. They lost, but they are a very good team. What amazed me was that, later, i found out more about these guys. What rudolf didnt tell me is that he won two iron crosses for bravery, saving the men in his care. What fred didnt tell me was he wounded on four separate occasions. He talked about being pinned down one day. This was his example of how good the german army was. He said, i was in this open field. I was pinned down. I couldnt move. I had to stay there all day and into darkness so that i could get off the field without being shot by the machine gun nest over on the other side of the field. What he didnt tell me was he earned a silver star that day. If you read the citation, there was a lot more to it than him being pinned down. Thats a purple heart. Probably should have four more or three more of them someplace. Remarkable men. I thought, if im going to write this book on saratoga, i want to write it like these guys would talk about their experience in world war ii. I want it to be personal and intimate. I want people to understand what it was like for those guys who were out there. As it turns out, there were some women, too, even in the revolution, who were out there getting shot at. Thats why the book has the appearance that it does. Its not a traditional history book. Its the way an archaeologist might tell the story. We tend to be detail people. An archaeologist can spend a whole summer digging in an area the size of his room, and we think thats this room, and we think thats the big view. Enough of that. I wanted to also point out to you how the armies were organized, so that i dont use terms that will confuse. The American Army had three divisions two divisions at the beginning. Each division had three or four brigades to start. Each brigade was made up of a few regiments. These were divided into companies, then the individual soldiers