Written in Bone

"Do you watch CSI or Bones or any of those forensic dramas on TV?"

I posed that question to one of the FBI lab technicians who was demonstrating investigative techniques in a small room at the far end of a current exhibit called Written in Bone at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).

The young woman and her colleague exchanged a knowing glance and a sympathetic shaking of the head, like they had heard the question a thousand times before.  "It's never that easy," she said.

The five women and one young man from the FBI were available to explain how some of the forensic techniques used in putting together the Written in Bone exhibit are the same as those used in criminal investigative field and lab work.  They represented FBI divisions concerned with evidence provided by human remains, manufactured materials, and geologic traces in crime and terrorism cases.

The two technicians from the Forensic Geology division caught my attention first, since my wife taught for years at a mining engineering university.  Standing behind a table with a tray of soil and rock samples, their earnest gazes made me think of Dr. Jack Hodgins on Bones, the TV show--a weekly must-see for my wife, in or out of season.

"What is it that attracts women to this work? And why five women here and only one man?" I asked the one male Geo tech.

"He's just lucky," asserted his female colleague, before he could answer.  "Actually most divisions have primarily women, except for explosives," she smiled.  Her colleague had been trained as an environmental scientist, but had found the work routine.  His answer approximated what most of the other techs said as well.  One young woman from Puetro Rico had actually earned an undergraduate degree in forensic science and had interned at the FBI, but she was the exception.  The others had started out elsewhere, but had been drawn to criminal investigation.  That was even the case with one young lady who had an undergrad degree in biology and a masters in anti-terrorism/national security from Rochester Institute of Technology (the degree is no longer offered).   All agreed that although it was not anything as intense or dramatic as in a television series, investigating cases at the FBI was still very interesting work.

I asked the woman in Forensic Geology what her most interesting case to that point had been.

"My second week on the job Timothy McVeigh's truck was brought into the lab, ironically in a rented Ryder truck."  Because she was new to the work, she mostly took notes while other technicians combed the vehicle for soil evidence that could place it at sites associated with the Oklahoma City bombing suspects.  The thrill of working on such a high profile crime hooked her on forensic work, which she, too, admitted was mostly a far cry from TV dramas.

"Although one time I did do some interesting field work on the Centennial Bomber case."  That case involved a bomb which killed one person and injured more than 100 others at Centennial Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics.  FBI investigators found a trowel which the bomber, Eric Rudolph, had used to bury explosives while developing and testing them.  To link the trowel to places Rudolph had been known to frequent, "they kept sending back samples that I knew were from unlikely sites, so I asked to be sent down South to help lead the search.  With my background in geology I could look at an area and know immediately that it was impossible for the soil on the trowel to have come from there."  She smiled.  "It saved the FBI a lot of time and trouble in the end."

The chance to talk with working forensic scientists amplifies what the Written in Bone exhibit so ably demonstrates--that careful investigation of post-mortem evidence can reveal many things about the dead.  Like the character Dr. Temperance Brennan demonstrates in the Bones series, forensic work is a part of solving both current and long-standing mysteries.  In the case of the exhibit, those mysteries reside in skeletal remains discovered at Jamestown, Virginia, and St. Mary's City, Maryland, colonial sites first settled in the early 1600's.

NMNH scientists, led by Dr. Douglas Owsley, have been sifting through physical remains from both sites, trying to piece together what occurred many years ago.  In the case of Jamestown, examinations of skeletal evidence suggest that one young settler, who was probably about 14-15 years old, may have died from an arrow wound to the thigh.  An arrowhead discovered near his humerus (see small white object near the skeleton's left leg bone in the image above) most likely was still embedded in his thigh muscle when he was buried.  But further examination revealed that he would likely have died even if he had not been the victim of an attack.

The lad had evidence of severe abscesses caused by two broken front teeth in his lower jaw.  Since the teeth had not been capped or treated--medical treatment at the time was both primitive and unavailable to these adventurers--they had become infected to the point that the boy was certainly in severe pain.  He also would have been breathing in the infection, poisoning his lungs as well.  The attacker's arrow merely hastened his death.

In other instances, forensic scientists have been able to match diary notes and corroborating information with burial evidence, as in the case of two men who died on the same day and whose skeletal remains were discovered in a single grave.  They were determined to be males of European ancestry based on bone analysis related to ethnic and sexual features, as well as bone growth patterns related to diet.  The fact that only Native American pottery shards and no artifacts from after the early decades of the 17th century were discovered at the grave level pinpoints the deceased as among the first Jamestown settlers.  A diary entry from one of the original Jamestown settlers names two men--Edward Harrington and George Walker--as dying and being buried on the same day.  Thus, a positive ID to these two skeletons, all thanks to a combination of archaeological, historical, and forensic information.

I recommend a visit to this exhibit, but don't rush through.  The first rooms detail how bones tell tales and the kinds of tools forensic scientists have at their disposal to help them discover the story of those who lived long ago.  Although these tools are not as fantastical as those amazing computer-generated graphics available to lab tech Angela Montenegro on Bones, they still provide for sophisticated investigation into our past and into the solution of contemporary crimes.

View a video, narrated by Dr. Owsley, Head of Physical Anthropology at NMNH, introducing the Written in Bone exhibit at http://www.anthropology.si.edu/writteninbone