We explore the relationship between black holes in Jackiw-Teitelboim (
JT) dilaton gravity and solitons in sine-Gordon field theory. Our anal
ysis expands on the well known connection between solutions of the sin
e-Gordon equation and constant curvature metrics. In particular, we sh
ow that solutions to the dilaton field equations for a given metric in
JT theory also solve the sine-Gordon equation linearized about the co
rresponding soliton. Since the dilaton generates Killing vectors of th
e constant curvature metric, it is interesting that it has an analogou
s interpretation in terms of symmetries of the soliton solution. We al
so show that from the Backlund transformations relating different soli
ton solutions, it is possible to construct a flat SL(2,R) connection w
hich forms the basis for the gauge theory formulation of JT dilaton gr
avity. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.