Introduction

Journal of Maritime Archaeology https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-024-09428-0 EDITORIAL Introduction James P. Delgado1 · Michael L. Brennan2 Accepted: 6 November 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024 The largest concentration of historic shipwrecks attributable to human agency are those from the global wars of the twentieth century, in particular the events leading to World War II, the global conflict of 1939–1946, and those lost in the first year of the emerging, subsequent Cold War. If you add postwar losses and the deliberate scuttling of World War II-era ships, the wartime losses of some 20,000 ships is a higher—and for now unquantified—number. There is more to the story than the numbers; World War II was a conflict that touched much of the world, and its waters. Paul Heersink’s amazing Esri StoryMap, “Sunken Ships of the Second World War”, available in ArcGIS, is an ongoing project that, as the website for it notes, helps “illuminate the magnitude of the war, its nuances, and its impact on the human level.” This is in terms of lives lost, the status of a number of these wrecks as war graves, and as well wrecks which hold deadly cargoes of unexploded ordnance or fuel—hazardous legacies that greatly prolong the costs of war. Paul’s dataset is a work in progress, and one that also compels those of us in the maritime archaeological community to bend to the oars and add the results of our own research, especially of projects that we have been part of where wrecks have been located, assessed, and documented. We have both been part of such projects for decades. That began for one of us in the 1980s, an early stage in the emerging focus on World War II wrecks, with work on USS Arizona, which grew in scope to encompass the sites and wrecks from the naval and aerial battle of Pearl Harbor, to the even larger project by the then Submerged Cultural Resources Unit of the U.S. National Park Service to address the war in the Pacific that was led by Daniel Lenihan, Larry Murphy, and Toni Carrell. That project then grew to include the wrecks from the immediate postwar atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. As Jennifer McKinnon outlines in her annotated WWII Underwater Archaeology Bibliography in this issue, the scope of that work came at the same time colleagues were working in other waters and on wrecks around the globe. It has dramatically expanded to reflect important theoretical shifts, challenging earlier models of projects and practice, and also addressing more than the archaeology of ships or historically-driven foci—especially in regard to the question of aircraft, human remains, and the environmental legacies of the war. It has also dramatically shifted from shallow water sites to the deepest parts of the * Michael L. Brennan 1 SEARCH, Washington, D.C., USA 2 SEARCH Inc., Jacksonville, FL, USA Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Maritime Archaeology ocean, at depths that were unthinkable when World War II ended and through much of the twentieth century. As we were working on this issue, we both participated with colleagues from around the world, via telepresence, to conduct the first detailed assessments of the wrecks of Akagi, Kaga, and USS Yorktown at the site of the 1942 air and sea Battle of Midway. It was a demonstration of a “sea change” in more than one way. The expedition was a demonstration of the technological shift to the capacity to work not only at extreme depths, but to link globally to colleagues—and the public—as those dives were broadcast to archaeologists in Japan and other countries, as well as throughout the United States. Images and commentary of the dives were broadcast live on Tokyo’s giant three-dimensional billboards. In 1990, as planning for the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor was taking place, the concept of Japanese and American archaeologists working together on the wrecks from the events of 7 December 1941 was deemed inconceivable when Japanese media asked that question. How far we have come in some ways, even as the threat of global war continues to rear its head, as it has since the end of the last world war. We have worked with colleagues to curate the series of articles in this special issue of the Journal of Maritime Archaeology to address the role of maritime archaeology in regard to the shipwrecks of World War II and the early years of the Cold War. It is not comprehensive, as it is filtered through the self-selective process of agreeing to author an article and submitting it for peer review. We nonetheless feel these works speak to the changes in approaches and the differing perspectives and foci—from the work done to bring resolution to families through the work of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Command (DPAA), the increased and necessary focus on submerged aircraft, to post-colonial projects and managing a difficult, shared heritage while correcting the historical record. The articles also address the technology of documentation and deviation analysis, and a larger landscape study of the only naval nuclear battlefield, albeit simulated. We also address the deadly legacy of discarded weapons. Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge our colleagues who answered the call for papers; Matthew W. Breece, Kim Browne, Leila Character, Colin Colbourn, Dan Davis, Carter DuVal, Robert Hess, Evan Kovacs, Terry Kerby, Megan Lickliter-Mundon, Samuel Malloy, Jennifer McKinnon, Russell E. Matthews, Alba Mazza, Calvin Mires, Mark A. Moline, Grant Otto, Andrew Pietruszka, Natali Pearson, Andrew Sherrell, Eric Terrill, Arthur C. Trembanis, Eric White, Hans Van Tilburg, Kotaro Yamafune. Author Contributions J.D. and M.B. wrote the Introduction. Data Availability No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study. Declarations Conflict of interest The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.  (...truncated)