Studies in Crime

An Introduction to Forensic Archaeology

Carol Heron,John Hunter,Geoffrey Knupfer,Anthony Martin,Mark Pollard,Charlotte Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135862879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

The study of forensic evidence using archaeology is a new discipline which has rapidly gained importance, not only in archaeological studies but also in the investigation of real crimes. Archaeological evidence is increasingly presented in criminal cases and has helped to secure a number of convictions.
Studies in Crime surveys methods of searching for and locating buried remains, their practical recovery, the decay of human and associated death scene materials, the analysis and identification of human remains including the use of DNA, and dating the time of death.
The book contains essential information for forensic scientists, archaeologists, police officers, police surgeons, pathologists and lawyers. Studies in Crime will also be of interest to members of the public interested in the investigation of death by unnatural causes, both ancient and modern.

Chapter one

A background to forensic archaeology

J. R. Hunter

1.1 Archaeology, anthropology and forensic science

Archaeology is beset by a perceptual problem. If pressed, most members of the public will profess interest or even enthusiasm in its practice, but few will have any accurate idea of what archaeology really involves or the nature of the scientific principles which underlie its study. To some extent this irony is understandable: the basic raw materials of archaeology are often uninspiring; archaeological trenches, like those of the gas and water utilities, provide an immediate attraction but thereafter contain little in the way of spectator interest. Visitors to working archaeological sites are often to be disappointed if they expect instant visions into the past – walls, buildings, roads or caches of objects abandoned by earlier societies and in some extraordinary way fossilized in time. Instead they see layers of drab earth or soil, perhaps interspersed with spreads of stones; vague differences in colour will indicate where walls or posts once stood, where roads ran, where pits were dug, or the place where fires had burned and food prepared, hundreds or even thousands of years earlier.Each layer of earth will be removed, examined and recorded systematically: its nature and formation will be analysed; its contents – artefacts, seeds, pollen, and animal bones – sent to specialists; and its position in a sequence of other layers identified for dating. Excavation is in many respects routine, unexciting and clinical; not so much a breathtaking discovery as a slow accumulation of data. With these data the archaeologist produces his or her own interpretation of the past, not just the physical reconstruction of what has been excavated, but a perception of the environment, the economy and the social attitudes of the people who existed within it. Other excavations in other places provide complementary data, and in this way visions of the past are slowly created in the same way that a wall is built, brick by brick.

The nature of the whole exercise has much in common with detection processes used in certain types of criminal investigation; in fact media phrases such as ‘time detectives’ are deliberately used to apply a known market interest in crime and crime solution to things of a historical and archaeological nature. The word ‘clue’ is often used in the same way, not for popularizing how archaeologists work, but for placing archaeological method in a context that people can understand. A book explaining archaeology to children even has the title How to be a Detective (Turner, 1991).

Reconstructing the past takes time, and disseminating the results in a way which is informative, interesting and uses the basic evidence in a way which is comprehensible takes skill. Archaeologists have spent almost as much time debating how to do it as in doing it (see Hills, 1993; Parker Pearson, 1993). But as a result archaeological literature has become more popularized and less stuffy, museums have shed their musty Victorian images, and exhibitions and reconstructions have become more sympathetic to the expectations of a public accustomed to theme parks, videos and visitor centres. Whether the perception the public is given is the ‘correct’ one continues to be argued in archaeological circles.

Buried remains, by their very nature of being hidden and unknown, also tend to generate a contrasting aura of public interest, no less curious, but less scientific in approach and differing in objectives from those of the archaeologist. To many people, things derived from the ground possess a strange aura of the past, of unknown times, peoples and beliefs – a perception fed by mass media which have long identified a huge popular market with an appetite for the unknown, the glamorous and the valuable. The same media have also generated images of the archaeologist as an individual, variously as the bearded, bumbling professor, the romantic figure, or the adventurer personified by Indiana Jones. There may be elements of truth in each, but the caricature is (sadly) unreal as much as the obsession with objects is wholly contrived. In these perceptions buried objects are seen as somehow containing an element of mystery because the circumstances which caused them to be made, used and ultimately deposited in the ground are, and will continue to be, unknown. It suits human nature within a predictable, science-based society that this uncertainty should persist. Unfortunately, it is a further irony that the very nature of archaeological work is to understand and to explain; and hence this stands in direct conflict with what many people believe archaeology to be about.

It is also ironic that during the last 30 years, and particularly in the last decade, the way in which archaeology has broadened as a discipline and developed as a field science is remarkable (Hunter and Ralston, 1993). The result is that the perceived gap between what archaeologists actually do and what it is thought they do seems to become increasingly wide. While in the late 1950s and early 1960s archaeology was very much a seasonal activity carried out on a purely research basis by a relatively small number of academics, it rapidly expanded in response to a threat posed by modern development, particularly in ancient towns. By the 1980s, archaeological units and groups had become established in most parts of the country, nearly every county possessed an archaeologist within its planning department, and the discipline achieved a level of professional acceptance within the allied construction and planning professions. This has since been extended to the tourist and leisure industry and, most recently, into private practice as the by-product of new guidelines stemming from central planning directives (DOE, 1990). Somewhere in the order of over two thousand archaeologists now work in Britain, mostly within the planning and development arenas. There are a number of professional networks, for example based on museum, district, or county associations; there is also a professional institute (The Institute of Field Archaeologists) which, among other things, advises on working practices.

The work of an archaeologist has many different facets, not only excavation but also survey, study of finds, environmental analysis, recording of standing buildings, education and a host of other areas both scientific and non-scientific which have a direct application in other fields and other professions. One of archaeology's strengths is its breadth, but one of its problems lies in integrating the many different strands of the study. Nor does it have any sharply defined starting or finishing points: a student in archaeology will cover topics ranging from anthropology to nuclear physics; some archaeologists spend all their working days in the field; some spend their time in the laboratory, while others write reports, plot aerial photographs, compile inventories of sites and monuments or draw up specifications for necessary archaeological work ahead of redevelopment.

Of the many fields into which archaeology's tentacles extend, and with which the relationship is probably least well defined, is anthropology (see also chapter 6). In the UK the discipline of anthropology is used quite separately from archaeology; it covers the study of mankind within the cultural parameters of behaviourism, ethnography and even folklore (social anthropology). Alternatively it can be used in an evolutionary metrical sense in which physiognomy (the study of facial characteristics) plays an important part (physical anthropology). In the United States anthropology is firmly rooted within the rigours of physical anthropology but has developed a much wider application to past human society, including aspects of archaeology itself. It was inevitable that its application in issues of race, gender, age and identity should eventually be recognized in a society increasingly faced with homicides, scattered or buried skeletal remains, air disasters and explosion, not to mention military conflict. Thus in the United States anthropology was able to operate within a forensic context – that is within the context of a legal arena -to the extent that forensic anthropology successfully emerged as an accepted discipline (see 1.3 below); under its wing forensic archaeology crept its way into respectability, partly due to the impossibility of finding a boundary between the two. In a major review of forensic anthropology one of its chief proponents, Clyde Snow, documents at length how physical anthropology emerged from the closet, how its potential was slowly realised – that its proponents needed to ‘expand the concept of forensic anthropology beyond its traditional and largely self-imposed boundaries of skeletal identification’ (Snow, 1982, p. 97). This book applies similar arguments to the discipline of archaeology.

Forensic anthropology, although undefined as such, is traceable back to the nineteenth century. In the United States a distinguished Professor of Anatomy, Thomas Dwight, was the first to identify the legal implications of skeletal identification (1878, reprinted 1978). A major legal precedent had already been set in the case of the Parkman murder of 1849, later used as a model for the interdisciplinary identification of unknown remains. The case is well amplified: it summarily consists of an instance of academic and financial dispute at Harvard University which culminated in the discovery of the dismembered remains of one of the protagonists, some attempt having been made to destroy those parts which might make identification possible (Snow, 1982, p. 102-4).

Forensic science itself goes back much further; Bono (1981, p. 162) cites the career of Ambrose Pare, a Belgian authority on wound ballistics as well as chemistry, who presented the first scientific case on record in a law court. Scientific opinion subsequently began to emerge as a natural consequence of scientific and technological discovery; Lawton (1980, p. 237) cites a precedent in the late eighteenth century, the case in point being whether the building of an embankment had caused the silting of a harbour – a factor which enabled a famous engineer of the day to enter the witness box in order to give his expert opinion. In the mid-nineteenth century William Palmer, a Midlands doctor and the so-called ‘Rugeley Poisoner’, was caught by new advances in forensic science. These were not based on factors of physical anthropology but on the general development of science with which anthropology was becoming entwined, in this case toxicology. Palmer was accused of a number of murders and is even said to have attended a post mortem of one of his own victims to try and save his own skin. Efforts to jog the pathologist's elbow, steal the forensic samples, and bribe the cart driver to crash all failed. Analytical chemistry, or its precursor, identified strychnine; and Palmer was hanged (Knight, 1987, p. 63). Meanwhile, in contemporary Europe anthropometrical theory was widely upheld, the Italian Cesare Lombroso and a French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon being among its proponents. The latter developed a number of indices and measurements of the body which became accepted as diagnostic of criminal tendencies, and created a bizarre vision of conviction being carried out by ‘burly policemen armed with calipers’ (Snow, 1982, p. 98).

George Dorsey, a Chicago anthropologist, is widely held as being one of the earliest true forensic experts (Stewart, 1978). His most notorious case was of a well-to-do local sausage manufacturer, Adolf Luetgert, who was arrested in 1897 for the murder of his wife Louisa who had mysteriously disappeared. Fragments of bones were recovered in the factory from a vat used for sausage production and were identified by Dorsey as the remains of Louisa Luetgert. The case received national coverage and was closely followed in Chicago itself where, as Snow observed, ‘the per capita consumption of bratwurst reached an all time low’ (1982, p. 100). A defence argument that the remains were of animal bone elevated the case even higher into forensic history by demonstrating that scientific opinion could differ.

The British had to wait somewhat longer for cases of national importance in which the skills of the physical anthropologist were applied, in fact until 1937 when the Lancaster doctor of French-lndian extraction, Dr Buck Ruxton, killed and dismembered his wife and a nursemaid, dumping the mutilated pieces over a bridge at Moffatt on the road to Edinburgh (Glaister and Brash, 1937). The case provided an early model for the identification of remains using evidence from both the house in Lancaster and the decomposed remains. Another forensic milestone occurred in 1953 when John Christie brutally murdered at least six women, one of whom was his wife, depositing their carcasses variously within the house and garden of 10, Rillington Place, London. Death was by both strangulation and by gassing, some of the bodies being papered behind walls and others being buried in the garden. The method of recovery by the Scotland Yard officers of the day probably lacked much in the way of archaeological sensitivity, but was sufficient to recover the remains from what has to be an unusually open burial site, and to make at least one identification on the basis of dental characteristics (Knight, 1987, p. 60). The investigation contained much archaeological relevance, although it is arguable as to whether archaeological methodology could have improved upon the outcome, but it could have come up with no less.

The uses of physical anthropology in cases of this type centre around a set of five basic questions which the discipline is uniquely empowered to answer. The same questions, perhaps with different emphasis or wording, appear in almost all anthropological manuals, courses and publications where the context is forensic:

1. Are the remains human?
2. How many individuals are represented?
3. What is the interval of time since death?
4. Can the individual(s) be identified?
5. What was the cause and manner of death?

While these questions are central to the practice of physical anthropologists, they are also close to areas which are frequently considered from an archaeological perspective in the study of buried remains. The third, for example, has a high degree of archaeological relevance: in evaluating the elapsed time since death, there is often a strong archaeological input from a contextual standpoint (see chapter 3), including the state and character of associated materials (and indeed in the proving of contextual association) – elements which are also relevant in the fifth question. In this respect the role of the archaeologist may be recognized, but may also be underplayed: ‘archaeologists and palaeopathologists can assist if there is doubt about how long ago the person died’ (Knight, 1987, p. 60). Archaeological principles are based on relative rather than absolute criteria and are therefore always relevant in the question of buried remains, irrespective of the age of the burial. There can be as much archaeological evidence gained from excavating a victim the day after the murder as in excavating the body ten years or even a thousand years later (see chapter 3). Other relevant buried factors and evidence may lie in association with the victim, and a number of these are discussed in later chapters, including the specialized field of entomology (Erzinclioglu, 1983) in which some researchers undertook controlled experiments using human cadavers (Rodriguez and Bass, 1983; also Mann, Bass and Meadows, 1990). Other examples, more clearly aligned with archaeological principles, have included branch growth and the development of root rings (Vanezis, Grant Sims and Grant, 1978; Willey and Heilman, 1988) as well as ...