In 2022, archaeologists digging into the remains of a defensive trench at Fort Mercer in Red Bank Battlefield Park in Gloucester County, New Jersey, found something they hadn’t gone looking for: a mass grave holding at least 15 men.
The archaeology and artifacts identified them as soldiers killed during the Battle of Red Bank fought on October 22, 1777. The battle was a disaster for the assaulting forces composed of regiments from the German state of Hesse-Cassel. These Hessians reinforced the British forces sent to fight the American Revolution. They had crossed an ocean to fight in a war that was not their own, and died thousands of miles from home. For almost 250 years, no one knew that they were there or who they were.
Raquel Fleskes (Photo by Katie Lenhart)
The effort to identify them is already underway, and a $25,000 Celebrate America! grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will expand it. Raquel Fleskes, an assistant professor of anthropology, will use the funding to extend the DNA analysis to the rest of the soldiers and to build a public website that tells their stories. The work is part of the Red Bank Battlefield Archaeology Project, a group effort co-led by historical archaeologist Wade Catts of South River Heritage Consulting and Jen Janofsky, a professor of public history at Rowan University.
The award is part of a national effort tied to the semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of American independence this month. The NEH program funds 250 projects across the country that examine the nation’s founding, which Fleskes approaches from an unexpected angle: the people who fought on the losing side.
For Fleskes, whose research has reconstructed the lives of enslaved and colonial-era people in early America, the Hessians offer a chance to widen a familiar story. The soldiers were fighting for someone else’s empire, and they rarely appear as individuals in accounts of the war.
“When telling stories about the colonial period, it is important to pay attention to what stories are being told,” Fleskes says.
Ancient DNA, recovered from bone and teeth that have spent centuries in the ground, can reveal a person’s ancestry, biological sex, and family ties even when no written record survives. In pilot testing, Fleskes and her colleagues sequenced genomes from three of the men. All three were unrelated males whose ancestry points to northern and northwestern Europe, consistent with German origins. The team presented the early results this spring at the meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.
“The preliminary results suggest that they may share ancestry with German populations, which would confirm the historical and archaeological context of the site,” Fleskes says.
Image of excavation area, outside wall of fort to the right, yellow indicating location of crania (Courtesy of Raquel Fleskes)
The multidisciplinary project team also includes Revolutionary War historian Robert Selig, bioarchaeologist Thomas Crist of Utica University, forensic anthropologists Anna Delaney and Stuart Alexander of the New Jersey State Police Forensics Lab, and Alexandra Heri and Katherine Reinberger of the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia.
Before any of the testing began, the team made sure the German War Graves Commission was aware of the find.
“All individuals, regardless of which side they fought on in the American Revolution, deserve honorable treatment in death and in the post-mortem,” Fleskes says. “By conducting research that is centered on reconstructing personhood and public outreach, we aim to treat these soldiers with the same respect in death that all persons deserve in life.”
The website, built with Dartmouth’s Digital Applied Learning and Innovation Lab, is expected to launch in spring 2027, and the team plans further analysis that could trace the men to specific regions of Germany. Fleskes sees the effort as part of how the country tells the story of its own founding.
“In life and in death, these soldiers played an important role in the forging of our independence, and we are grateful to tell their stories using state-of-the-art methods, such as ancient DNA,” Fleskes says.