Prof. D. Ryan Gray will lead a group of students and archaeologists 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.

LSU New Orleans Archaeological Research and Curation (LSU New Orleans ARC) has announced the launch of its latest partner project with the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), intended to help fulfill the DPAA’s mission of making the fullest possible accounting of missing-in-action American service personnel.  

Prof. D. Ryan Gray will lead a group of students and archaeologists from LSU New Orleans (to be renamed LSU New Orleans in July) to investigate a location believed to be associated with a World War II–era aircraft crash and the loss of an American pilot in central Italy. They will join longtime colleague Prof. Harald Stadler, archaeologists affiliated with the University of Innsbruck and the Archäologische Forschungsgruppe Osttirol in Austria on this project. It will mark the team’s first project in Italy and their seventh recovery mission with the DPAA.

The LSU New Orleans team will incorporate many other contributors to this mission. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans is planning 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 two members of the Museum’s Historical Research Services team, Rebecca Poole and Stephen Bateman, will be joining, contributing their rich historical expertise on World War II to the excavation efforts. They will also be joined by professional archaeologists from Tamarix, a longtime Italian partner organization that continues to offer support for DPAA activities in Italy.

The group will be augmented by additional students from two different institutions. This summer, the DPAA is leading a ROTC Initiative, sending teams of cadets and midshipmen to MIA recovery missions across four different countries. The goal of this initiative is to create a permanent annual summer training partnership with each of the service branches, providing future military officers an impactful developmental experience while they assist in the important mission of bringing our Missing in Action home. A group of cadets from Tulane will join the excavation through this initiative. Finally, building upon 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, the Executive Director of the Michael and Sara Moskau Institute of Archaeology, will lend their expertise to the project.

The project was developed as a public-private partnership with DPAA, to further the DPAA’s mission to locate, recover, identify, and return unaccounted-for US personnel from previous wars and conflicts. LSU New Orleans’s first partner project with the DPAA in 2017 resulted in the recovery and identification of the remains of Captain Lawrence Dickson, the first of 27 missing Tuskegee Airmen from World War II to be recovered. Another LSU New Orleans mission in Germany resulted in the recovery and identification of two B-17 crew members, Technical Sergeant William Leukering and Staff Sergeant Edgar Mills.  

The team believes that all families deserve closure and the dignified treatment of their lost loved ones, and the team is proud to partner with the DPAA and to ensure that military personnel are returned for proper burial.