Digging Them Up I & 2

you about 3/4 of our work is with the private sector a developer buys the family farm to develop and it has a cemetery on it which must be relocated for development purposes the bodies normally a very East and West the head being at the west the feet being at East which is an English cosplayer that was brought over because by biblical price for coming the psychic coming from the east so everybody can stand and see what we're digging up is what they've heard the ancestors talk about back then they were to dig in a grave wrapping them in burying them and then as they became more subtle they was usually somebody in the neighborhood that could make a pine box and there were no sawmills back then so most of the families kept boards for building purposes and things and the wider boards they actually saved to make coffins out of once you take the topsoil off you can very easily see with the naked eye we're at the top once you go through the topsoil that the soul is mixed and you can see the outline of the grave once you get through the top soul this box is 24 inches in length 16 inches in width and 12 inches in height the reason this size box is used is the only written guidelines for disinterring bodies in North Carolina is by the North Carolina Department of Transportation which will hold the normal body so this is what we use is also known as the Sutton casket as part of us to log off of the casket these are some picture frames here we we make up a board on every grave that we relocate in a cemetery and basically what it says it gives the name of the cemetery the account of the county we're working in and the date will work this what we actually get out of the grave belongs to the grave so we make the announcement ahead of time if we we find something like a ring piece of jewelry so they can look at it and all at it but it must go in the box and it must be reburied because it's the property of the grave there's 20 people out there that have equal rights to it how do you divide it I think it's legitimate to say the house has served this family from 1764 and that's a long time I must say I have been nagged for 15 years since the wonder I put up with him my husband who says my dear I think you should do something about them eteri out in the middle of a field and then he started telling me war stories such as I tell me what's going to happen Margaret that whoever buys that it's going to come along and grab up all those little marble stud son take them over to the woods and throw them away and then the next that morning when you get up or somebody else gets up it's been plowed over and it belongs to the farm and that's not the way to treat your ancestors so finally we moved and we moved of course with mr. Sutton Ward Sutton and it's been easy since then I had never really thought about what happens the process of decay or whatever but somehow I thought that the each casket on great would have here's the head of the bones here are the arms here are the lips it was amazing that we even saw bones but we saw hair pins and we saw button and it was very interesting to hear that from the buttons you could tell is this the grave of a female or a male because I think they females for three holes in the button yeah three olds and three poles and the button or four for the male if you've liked Oh 12 of us [ __ ] yeah ah [ __ ] for Viacom i father's favorite dog what was that dog's name oh I was counting on you mockery Tuffy is the one that don't give us a companion as she said and went out to the cemetery and he buried the remains of puffing as it turned out we as we were searching outside of the fence there were some bones that didn't look right and come to find out one of the family members had buried two dogs out there we moved the dog bones with the right stuff they were part of the family remains are in and the cemetery plot in a little town called Walston burg where we all grew up went to high school and and they have a cemetery there that's well-kept and it's called perpetual pear we bought it purchased four plots and this is where we relocated just a better word all of the new were over in this cemetery as well as the the couple that we found so everybody is there and it's quite it's quite beautiful because those two sons just stand up like I mean they're really tall and not an arrow and I think we did future people like Evelyn who's done with all of this research about a family because we've said who is there and why not we're their registered inch snow bill and you've cared for the people who came before you because certainly and we're still doing that you you when I was five I witnessed crash it was a fairly large plane colliding with a small and right near the asheville hendersonville area and so it fell all around where we were and I saw a lot of human remains in that situation my dad was with me and and answered my questions you know instead of being a horrific event for me it was an intellectually stimulating event I hate to say it that way but it got me really curious and so I pursued that all through my career one thing about being a forensic anthropologist almost everything you encounter is not the expected it almost everything you encounter is something new and interesting and when I was in graduate school I really had a rich training in forensic anthropology so I was able to follow my advisor Paul Shuey on his cases while I was a graduate student a master student every one of them is different every one of them is interesting up it's usually the medical examiner or a coroner or somebody in law enforcement that calls me in to it and they do that because they have some remains either they don't know if they're human or not or they know they're human and they some kind of interpretation in terms of how the person died what happened to them who they were some of the biological parameters that speak to that I don't determine cause of death that's the medical examiner in the coroner's job but I can advise the corner of the medical examiner on my findings for him or her to incorporate into the findings that come from the rest of the case forensic anthropology got its start in the United States back in the 19th century later on in the 20th century the wars played a big role because there you had numerous sets of human remains from war dead and it was known who they were and it was known how tall they were they're all measured when they go into the military and so some of their biological parameters were already known so some methods could be worked out on those skeletons later on in the 70s the discipline really kind of took on a name and took on an academic status and we became American Academy of Forensic Sciences they started a section for anthropologists there has been a an increase at least in the profile of forensic anthropology in the public you know because shows like bones and CSI and you know mainly mainstream TV a lot of our students come here because they saw bones and they want to do that kind of work and be that kind of sort of you know I don't know what the word is but sort of popular anthropologist sort of a hotshot they get in here though and we expose them to the tedium that our field is rife with because people don't realize there's a lot that goes on in the lab that takes time and sometimes you know you're in one position with a trowel all day just scraping off little layers of dirt and you know it's not what they expect it's a field that combines hard science biological science and chemistry and sometimes physics with social science and I think it at least for me it's satisfied the wanting to apply what I was learning to something that would help society in some way so it's taking a heart science and it's applying it to people and it's helping people and so I think I that that's why other women want to get into it it's also something it that seems accessible I think to women because there's been this demographic shift well when I came here it was 2005 the Chancellor at that time was John Bardo and he wanted a forensic anthropology program and he wanted a human decomposition facility and you have to have someone at the top wanting these things in order to make it happen and he did make it happen and once I got here when I came we had about 20 or 30 students and soon thereafter we it really started to grow exponentially in a very short time we had over a hundred students and so my contribution has been I teach classes in mainly upper level classes in various topics within forensic anthropology such as we do a skeletal analyses course where the students their senior students and they have a skeleton that they follow all the way through all the lab work and they interpret they estimate age and sex and stature and ancestry and look for trauma pathology and all these things my students who take dental anthropology learn how to identify individual loose teeth because you do come across those and you need to be well familiar with teeth in this field there's also a summer field school that I teach and it's called field recovery of human remains they locate and process a scene on the on the surface bone scattered on the surface and a buried scene as well and they get a little bit of an opportunity to learn how to recognize the different signs of decomp in the facility so my contribution has been to bring some of the applied hands-on here's what you're going to do when you become a forensic anthropologist training to our student the human decomposition facility we call it the forensic osteology research station or forest for short and it is in the forest it's a an enclosed space with double fencing there's a privacy fence and the chain-link and the fences are buried so that animals can't dig in it's a place where we put donated human remains human bodies out to decompose and we study the decomposition process and it's been it we were able to get this in 2007 and we put our first person in in 2008 and since then we've had a steady stream of donations and the it's been my project since I've been here it was kind of handed to me which is really cool from my perspective because there's only six of these in the country we were the second the famous body farm at UT Knoxville was the first and we were the second and right now these facilities are becoming a little bit more common there's six right now there's a seventh one that may come up online soon and rumors of 8th and 9th ones and so I've started a group of directors of the facilities are four of us right now of the six that meet and we're kind of trying to set the standards for how you manage maintain facilitate research and take care of a human decomposition facility and the biggest contribution I think our facility has had though to data station and training we run a cadaver dog training course twice a year when I came here I came from Ohio in the flat part of a high easy I won't say easy but it's easy for to traipse through a cornfield looking for human remains than it is a sloped forest and it just so happened that not long after that a student came to me and wanted into the program who had been a cadaver dog trainer it was an older student and wanted to refine the training using the decon facility to expose these dogs to the real the real thing and so I was on board pretty much from the beginning you know the dogs can do that and so that's been one major contribution I think to education in general our students have a wonderful opportunity with the human decomp facility there are no other undergraduate students who have the access that our students do to decomposing human remains one of the strengths of our field I think is and where a lot of I guess I'd venture to say most forensic anthropologists are now employed is with the federal government and other entities that look for remains that are the result of Wars where they want to repatriate remains to families or mass fatality incidents or things like the dirty civil wars that went on in South America in the past half decade and so people may not realize that one of our big contributions to society is to hold people accountable for mistreatment of other humans on a large scale and so we can collect the evidence that is needed for war tribunals for example so that people can be brought to justice well my students many of them want to go that route and so I'm trying to prepare them in not just the lab part of forensic anthropology but the field part because they'll certainly be doing that

Channel: Down East Documentaries

Views: 217,748

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Id: 3uamRUAkOgU

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015