 Thank you Philip. Good afternoon. It's been a wonderful experience co-organizing with Philip and Chris, and of course Dr. Carmen, who shall be joining us shortly. I'm here to present a short introduction to my PhD research, which is on American military cemeteries that are not in America, so they are situated overseas, primarily those in Europe. And I find it fitting to be going at the end of our session on the World Wars, as I am focusing primarily on the end of many people's lives in these wars within these cemeteries. And a lot of the time you think of the cemetery, but you don't think of how people get there. So today I'm going to be going through, we're going to go through from soldier to headstone, be a little bit of military history, swear there's some heritage in it, I promise. So the first you have to ask, why do we collect the soldiers and then bury them? As much as I wish that the people would collect the soldiers primarily for the heritage and the archaeology, that's not their reason for it. One of the main reasons is forensics. Warfare is very dangerous, very bloody, but apparently there is a correct way to do war. So if you have captured some soldiers, you have POWs, and you execute them as a war crime, so you need to collect your dead to do the forensics to make sure they died in the conventional warfare, the proper way that things would happen. Another reason you collect them is due to health reasons. Dying, dead, decaying bodies on the battlefield of the Somme or Passchendaele, that's bad for your soldiers that are still fighting, and the commanders, they didn't want that, so they had to have them cleared away. There's a political reason. You're asking your public to send their sons and daughters off to war into conflict if they feel that their soldiers and their sons and their families are not being taken care of, that's going to be bad for the home front and that's going to hurt morale back home. There's also the morale of your soldiers. If they're not being taken care of, they see that their friends that they had formed bonds with over months of training and years of service are just laying there in fields. That's going to be bad, no one wants to go through that. They want to protect their friends. They want the same honor as well. They want their friends to go for them. And then there's also the moral. Wars are fought with money and they are fought for many reasons, but another cost is that of human life and that does add up and people will foot the bill to their politicians, to their country, and to their leaders. So there's the moral duty to collect your soldiers. And the types of recovery are different. I'm sure Flanders would be different and this is from purely American context. You have the combat recovery. This is the much more glamorized version you see in the movies where you go for your friend, you hear their dying breaths and you take them to the medical tent. This is the one that is the most common and the most understood. There's also post-combat recovery. This is dangerous especially for the Americans in Vietnam. One of the things is you would have snipers or they would knowing that you would come back for your deceased soldiers, they would booby trap the bodies. So then you have to lose more soldiers to gain one. And so this was a very common problem in the 60s and the 70s and 50s. There's area clearance. If you are going after an engagement, you have won a conflict, you've won a battle, you've won the ridge. Now you have to go and clear it from mines or the barbed wire or make sure the trenches are all cleared from World War I. And all of these things could still be there, could still go off. You could run into enemy troops that are doing scouting missions of their own and these lead to more conflicts. And there's the historical clearance. This is the most pertinent today. Sam talked about it in the Flanders context. Immediately after World War I and World War II, the American military had specific divisions set up to investigate where missing soldiers might be found. Although today, 70, 80 years on, if we get a tip that there's a soldier in an area, they will send out someone and an archaeologist like ourselves will go out and help them excavate it and try to help identify them. Or if it turns out to be someone from Flanders or Germany, we will then contact them and make sure proper dues is done. There's also non-combat recoveries. These would be soldiers who are wounded and taken to hospital and then they died of their wounds there or of other diseases just not on the battlefield. They're not in conflict with anyone. The two cemeteries that I will show later in the UK, a lot of those casualties are non-combat recoveries. And now we will look at how the process has changed. As America is famous, we always bring our fallen home, always, but that has not always been the case. Earlier, the earliest we have of bringing a soldier home is from the 1800s. The Spanish American War is a family asking to bring their officers home. If it was a normal foot soldier, the request would not even be considered. But an officer, if their family wished to foot the entire bill, the quartermaster could go and try to locate that grave on the battlefield and then bring them home. And then before the Civil War, Congress realized that there was going to be a lot of bloody conflicts. So they signed the National Cemetery Act, allowing people to make national cemeteries. And so following the Civil War, it was the first time that we had such a large-scale attempt to get the Union soldiers from all of the battlefield temporary cemeteries that had been set up and to relocate them into one solitary permanent national cemetery that could be protected and looked after and maintained. World War I and World War II then presented numerous problems. You're so far from home, how do you get the body back in a quality condition to do these things? The answer was you just couldn't at the time. So that is where these cemeteries and all of these battles came to be. So that is when the American Battle Mine and its commission was established, was to design and construct these cemeteries. I will go further into them a little later. And at the start of the Korean War and Korean conflict, the technology had finally caught up. So refrigerated boxcars and trains and planes arrived and they were obviously, they were widely available. So very shortly the December of 1950, the American military decided to enact concurrent return where if we have a deceased soldier we automatically bring them home as soon as possible. And that is still the policy today, although there are times such as the remainder of the Korean conflict and then Vietnam where battle fronts are shifting so rapidly that we cannot control the area long enough to obtain our soldiers. And that's how you see things like today with President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea talking about returning some of these deceased soldiers that they still have in their possession. That's how these things start to come about. So the American Battle Mines Commission was established in 1923 shortly after World War I to design and construct all the cemeteries for World War I. But the maintenance of them was still under the Department of War and the Army's Graves Registration Service. So that started to maybe have some issues and conflicts. You don't want the American military in your country long after the conflict is over. So instead Congress decided to give control of all these cemeteries to the American Battle Mines Commission, which is an independent agency under the executive branch, but they are not military in design. This is a map of all of these cemeteries that they run in mainland Europe. So there are two in Italy and there's one in North Africa. These are from the Anzio campaigns during World War II. And there is a zoomed in version because many of these cemeteries are built temporarily as the campaigns are going, as they're trying to push east into Germany both in World War I and World War II. And eventually they just became the permanent settlements or if they were moved it wasn't very far. So the major cluster of them is around the France-Germany border. And there are the two Cambridge and Brookwood in the UK from the Battle of the Atlantic and just recovery non-combat fatalities as well. So currently today they take care of a total of 26 cemeteries outside of the United States and 29 monuments. They are quite active within the last five years. They have gained the Panama cemetery from the Panama Conflicts and the Mexican American War apologies. And so they are definitely trying, if there is a cemetery outside of the United States they are trying to take it under their agency so they can protect it and they can take care of it and they can look after it. So my PhD started because I wanted to understand the heritage of the commemoration of these places. They're not in the United States. National cemeteries in the US are usually they have a very nationalist atmosphere and a story behind them. And I wanted to know how would that transfer to these overseas sites and situations. So just a small little overview of the criteria to be considered heritage in the United States. It must be associated with an event that has made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history. Associated with the lives of persons of significance and that was a little bit of a test and a hurdle for certain heritage sites especially cemeteries. Or you can embody distinguishing characteristics of a type or architecture if you were the work of a genius like Da Vinci. He was not an American but he's a nice little, he's a nice example. Or the most commonly used for heritage sites in the States especially for CRM is if you are likely to yield information about prehistory or history. But among many others, many other types cemeteries have specific criteria. So they have to meet one of the four I just listed but they must also meet one of these other three or four. They either have to be the grave of the person of transcendent importance. I would like to look further into the use of the word transcendent in this example because I'm sure that is used quite interpretationally. They have to be of a certain age, distinctive design features associated with historic events. These overlap a little bit with the other four. But military cemeteries are different and this bulletin by the National Park Service, they are listed separately as a sub-clause. Due to their ability, they are primary memorials to the military history of the United States. These areas with distinguished national cemeteries that have been used or prepared for the reception of the remains of veterans and their dependence as well as any landscaped areas that immediately surround the graves may qualify. Because these cemeteries draw their significance from the presence of the remains of military personnel who have served their country throughout its history, the age of the cemetery is not a factor in judging eligibility although integrity must be present. There are certain ones in France where they didn't have the money to maintain them so they went into a dilapidated state for a while before the ABMC was able to get a grant. That's only happened once or twice. So to kind of make a conclusion and really jump back to getting beyond national borders, if you were in doubt, I hope you are no longer, these cemeteries would definitely be considered heritage within the United States. Outside of them, they are mentioned, since we have some English heritage people here, I'd love to talk to them a little more later, Brookwood in London is mentioned as a legacy in English heritage website due to its association with the larger Brookwood cemetery next to it. But they are not technically heritage, they're not defended like heritage. In the American Battle Minutes Commission reports, they list them as heritage items, but they are not overseen and no legislation of heritage deals with them from the United States. I think national borders offer quite the hurdle and question for archaeologists such as ourselves and legislators about how to deal with these things. None of these cemeteries are considered American land, they are on loan into perpetuity with no tax or charge. So who knows how to deal with these things? Hopefully I can answer that question about three or four years. Thank you.