Long Pauses

Tag: Anthropology

  • Speculate Away

    So I assume you’ve all heard that several former American hostages are claiming that the president-elect of Iran was one of their captors in 1979. Well my wife, who is a forensic artist, got a call today from a booking agent at Fox News, who invited her to appear as a talking head on one of their live shows, using her expertise to prove or disprove the claims.

    Isn’t that a riot? After considering it for an hour or two, she politely declined their offer. We looked at the then/now photos and decided that the only claim she could honestly make is, “There is nothing in these photos that would confirm without a doubt that these are not photos of the same man.” But we figured that the nuances of any sentence that employed a double-negative construction would be lost in the white noise of cable news. Isn’t it amazing, though, that a news producer would think a Google search and a pre-interview phone call would be enough to establish someone as a credible source?

    Reminds me of a clip I saw on the Daily Show a week or two ago. During their coverage of the Michael Jackson trial (I think), the host of a show on Fox News discovered that some story was about to break but he had no details. He then turned to the other members of his panel and said, “Well, we don’t know what’s happening exactly, but it must be big. Speculate away!” As Jon Stewart says, cable news has now officially become a bunch of guys with a camera, talking.

    I don’t know what I’m more proud of: that Jo was asked or that she declined the offer.

  • A Note from Knoxville

    Newsday posted a fun article yesterday about the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility. Of course, the word “fun” is totally relative when you’re talking about something like the “Body Farm” — a two-acre plot of land just across the river from UT’s main campus, where donated bodies decompose under the close scrutiny of forensic anthropologists.

    Some of the 30 to 50 cadavers arriving at the Body Farm each year come courtesy of local medical examiners donating unclaimed bodies. But much more frequently, the arrivals are pre-arranged by consenting donors who have expressed an active interest in the facility’s research and who have completed a biological questionnaire detailing their medical histories. The facility has amassed hundreds of these completed questionnaires by its future donors.

    During their talks at a conference held by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, [Dr. Richard] Jantz and fellow researcher Arpad Vass detailed the clues to be gleaned from nature’s disposal process — a process that begins about four minutes after death. Each stage includes its own march of the macabre. Flies begin laying their eggs in available crevices during the fresh stage, said Vass, a forensic scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The gaseous by-products of bacteria lead to bloating during the second stage. In the third, called active decay, the body’s soft tissue liquefies and insect holes proliferate. And in the fourth, or dry, stage, the body becomes little more than bones.

    Nice, eh?

    In a roundabout way, the Body Farm is the reason that I live in Knoxville. When I was researching doctoral programs, my wife’s ears perked up at the mention of UT. She had been interested for some time in forensic anthropology and forensic art and was well-acquainted with the program here. She’s since taken a bachelor’s degree from them and has developed into something of an asset for the department as well. She’s over there right now, in fact, reconstructing the face of a young girl who has gone unidentified since the early-1980s.

    That type of work makes me glad for two things: that there are people out there willing to do it, and that they ain’t me.