Phil Shiman and David Lowe multitasking while studying tunnels.
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Park archeologist and Resource Manager Julie Steele.
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Welcome to the Petersburg Project!
We are a small band of professionals (two historians and an archeologist) who have devoted a significant part of our lives to studying the role of fortifications in American Civil War military campaigns, and especially the rise of trench warfare during the last two years of the war. We believe that the near universal embrace of battlefield entrenchments by both sides, in both Eastern and Western Theaters, represented a revolution in military tactics and strategy that foreshadowed the entrenched stalemate of the First World War. Much of this development played out on the battlefields of Petersburg.
Understanding the nuances of this revolution is essential if one is to grasp the nature of the battles and campaigns of 1864-1865 in particular. Yet little research has been done on the subject because of the challenges posed by its technical, engineering nature and the inadequacy of traditional historical methods that rely heavily on textual sources.
We hope to change that, one post at a time. The Petersburg Project seeks to unlock the secrets of trench warfare using a cross-disciplinary approach involving textual research, field surveys, archeological investigations, and detailed analyses of the contemporary maps and photographs. We are making use of some of the newest tools available, including LiDAR, high-resolution digital scans of old photographs, and geographical information systems (GIS); as well as some of the oldest, such as eyeballs and boot leather. Our methods are most similar to those of battlefield archaeology but we like to think we are "lurching ahead" in new directions. Sometimes, we may fall over.
Our personal work will be freely available to all (with due credit). We believe a website is the best vehicle to share information, piece at a time. Here we explain our methods, lay out our evidence, and present our findings as well as random thoughts, ruminations, and hallucinations. We intend the site to be a living document that will grow and evolve for years as we add material and make corrections.
Our desire is to advance knowledge and assist the activities, not just of historians who write, but also public historians, landowners, organizations, and government agencies who preserve and interpret the earthworks in their care. We believe that interest in the subject of military engineering and fortifications in particular is growing.
We don't want to do this alone. We like trudging around the woods with like-minded folks, looking at historic piles of dirt, trying to get into the heads of the military engineers and the common soldiers of 1864-1865.
We hope to change that, one post at a time. The Petersburg Project seeks to unlock the secrets of trench warfare using a cross-disciplinary approach involving textual research, field surveys, archeological investigations, and detailed analyses of the contemporary maps and photographs. We are making use of some of the newest tools available, including LiDAR, high-resolution digital scans of old photographs, and geographical information systems (GIS); as well as some of the oldest, such as eyeballs and boot leather. Our methods are most similar to those of battlefield archaeology but we like to think we are "lurching ahead" in new directions. Sometimes, we may fall over.
Our personal work will be freely available to all (with due credit). We believe a website is the best vehicle to share information, piece at a time. Here we explain our methods, lay out our evidence, and present our findings as well as random thoughts, ruminations, and hallucinations. We intend the site to be a living document that will grow and evolve for years as we add material and make corrections.
Our desire is to advance knowledge and assist the activities, not just of historians who write, but also public historians, landowners, organizations, and government agencies who preserve and interpret the earthworks in their care. We believe that interest in the subject of military engineering and fortifications in particular is growing.
We don't want to do this alone. We like trudging around the woods with like-minded folks, looking at historic piles of dirt, trying to get into the heads of the military engineers and the common soldiers of 1864-1865.
Julie Steele presenting on Petersburg at the Fields of Conflict Conference at the Pequot Museum in 2018.
The primary goals of the Petersburg Project are to improve the understanding of trench warfare during the American Civil War, raise public awareness of the significance of entrenched battlefield sites, and promote the documentation, preservation, and interpretation of the surviving earthworks and other relevant [features and] artifacts. To accomplish these goals, we are also seeking new, clearer ways of presenting the information, much of it highly technical, to make it accessible and useful to casual readers and specialists alike. We hope that this website will serve as a testbed for some of these approaches.
The Project's historians and archeologists are using a cross-disciplinary approach involving textual research, field surveys, archeological investigations, and detailed analyses of the contemporary maps and photographs [, LiDAR and the powerful analytical capabilities of geographical Information systems (GIS)]. What we do is closely akin to what is commonly known as "battlefield archeology."
The Petersburg Project is cooperating with Petersburg National Battlefield and other elements of the National Park Service, with preservationists, local historians, and with the Civil War Fortification Study Group. But the voice here is our own. We hope to encourage a dialogue on this subject among these communities and especially between historians and archeologists, who in the United States at least have tended to work within their own separate spheres. The knowledge, skills, and tools of both professions are essential for unlocking the secrets of the entrenched battlefield.
The Project's historians and archeologists are using a cross-disciplinary approach involving textual research, field surveys, archeological investigations, and detailed analyses of the contemporary maps and photographs [, LiDAR and the powerful analytical capabilities of geographical Information systems (GIS)]. What we do is closely akin to what is commonly known as "battlefield archeology."
The Petersburg Project is cooperating with Petersburg National Battlefield and other elements of the National Park Service, with preservationists, local historians, and with the Civil War Fortification Study Group. But the voice here is our own. We hope to encourage a dialogue on this subject among these communities and especially between historians and archeologists, who in the United States at least have tended to work within their own separate spheres. The knowledge, skills, and tools of both professions are essential for unlocking the secrets of the entrenched battlefield.
Welcome. Please take some time to browse the website using the navigational links at the top of the page. There is a lot of material, which we are editing and updating all the time. As of now the structure of the site is rather chaotic but it is expected to improve with age. We have implemented a blog and comment section at and look forward to your input. Thanks for visiting. Y'all come back now ....
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"Sometimes you find yourself alone in the woods with history smothering you from all sides. It is best at those moments to absorb the lessons. Why did the soldiers throw the dirt this way and not that way? These are things the diaries don't tell us, but the ground does."
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updated 11/30//2017
