Sprawled on her back in the dirt, with her head resting on one side, and her elbows bent as if she was about to prop up, is an elderly woman. She was already dead for three months, and her face was no longer recognizable.
She was among more than 150 corpses scattered beneath the trees, rotting in the open air or covered in plastic, on roughly three wooded acres.
This might look like a serial killer’s dumping ground for an outsider, but this was just another ordinary day at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Anthropology Research Facility. This facility, known as the “body farm”, is one of the first of only a handful of such facilities in the world where researchers study human decay and law enforcement officers train to retrieve human remains at crime scenes.
The dead woman was there to play her part in a developing frontier in forensic crime solving: analyzing and interrogating the suite of trillions of microorganisms and other creatures that are witness to our deaths.
“It’s an exciting time,” said Dawnie Steadman, director of the school’s Forensic Anthropology Center — through which the body farm operates — standing in the shade to escape the nearly 95-degree heat one morning in late May. “We’re in an age of technology where the microbes can help provide new answers about time of death, but also whether a body was moved, and medical conditions inside the body that can help identify a person.”
Post-mortem interval, which is the calculation of time since death, is an important aspect of forensic investigation. It is one of the focuses of body farm research.
When an individual is unidentified, the post-mortem interval can help investigators narrow down who they might be based on missing persons records. “If we say, well, this individual passed away at least a year ago,” Steadman said, “then we know not to look at recent cases.”
More details about this topic over at Undark.
(Image Credit: Rene Ebersole/ Undark)