CSI: U of L
Forensic anthropology students learn to bring back the dead
By Michael Jackman
Long after the rest of your mortal remains are gone, what's left?
Your bones.
Bones are to forensic anthropologists what stones are to geologists--the bedrock of the body, the frame upon which stories are built. And undergraduates in U of L's new forensics anthropology minor are learning to tell the tales hidden in skeletons, to bring the dead back to life.
This fact is underscored by about 16 wooden frames neatly arranged in the forensic anthropology lab at 1820 Arthur St. The exhibits are part of Phil DiBlasi's "Fundamentals of Skeletal Forensics" course, one of the minor's core classes.
 Archeologist Phil DiBlasi takes skull measurements with the help of graduate student Katie Keene. |
DiBlasi, an archeologist, likes to call it "Fun with Skeletal Forensics." The wooden frames resemble tea trays, except that instead of holding white porcelain cups and plates of crumpets sitting on a napkin, they hold variously stained skulls, femurs and other seemingly inscrutable body parts resting on a layer of bubble wrap.
The lab is deserted at the moment, except for the fragments of the deceased and 23-year-old graduate student Katie Keene, one of DiBlasi's proteges, who's demonstrating just what a skilled scientist can accomplish. A few feet away is DiBlasi's office.
It's a place that itself resembles an archeological site. The yellow and brown plush carpet--a relic of an earlier time--is patterned like the smudged, prehistoric cave drawings DiBlasi has studied. With its dust-coated tomes, periodicals, maps and folders perilously piled about, it's almost the stereotypical absent-minded professor's domain of the 1930s.
Placing it in modern days, however, are the fax machine, cans of Campbell's Chunky Soup on the shelves and the office's one bright, shiny artifact: an HP laptop upon which the gray-bearded DiBlasi types furiously, administering an online exam.
Keene picks up a jagged, cylindrical part of a human femur. "This was probably a male," she says, pointing to a small ridge she identifies as the linea aspera. It's a muscle attachment site, and she assumes the once-living owner's gender by its size. This particular linea aspera belonged to someone who did a lot of physical labor. Keene, however, is quick not to jump to conclusions. "Women can do hard work and develop a strong linea aspera as well," she says.
Keene clearly is thrilled at being able to uncover the secrets of a life based only on small pieces of bone and imagined sinew. And who wouldn't be?
"It's like unlocking a mystery," she says. "I love it, I'm good at it. I want to devote my life to it." Her comment, delivered in the soft drawl of her natal Louisville, sounds a tad rehearsed, as if these were words composed for a graduate school application essay. And, indeed they were.
Keene is in the middle of applying to four of the nation's 10 forensic anthropology graduate programs: University of Tennessee, Knoxville; University of New Mexico; Michigan State University; and Mercyhurst College. Graduate-level training leading to an academic career is one of the options open to students minoring in forensic anthropology. Careers in criminal justice or lab investigation for law enforcement agencies such as the FBI are among those options, too. This is Keene's second round of applications.
"I put it down to lack of experience applying and articulating why I want to pursue this," she says of why she thinks she was not admitted last year.
"You need to work on that!" DiBlasi yells from his inner sanctum.
Keene nods, unperturbed. She picks up a skull and ponders it, Hamlet-like, for a moment. It seems the typical skull--round, white, except for circular gray stains on the front and dark holes from which eyes once peered.
The skull is that of a white male, a senior citizen judging by the cranial sutures. It dates from the early to mid 1800s. "This was my independent study," she says.
Keene then explains the two small holes drilled into the cranium, pointing with her chin over to the corner of the lab where a skeleton hangs by its skull from a rack. "We figured he was displayed once like that guy over there."
'I hate that show'
Forensic anthropologists may bring skeletons to life, but someone had to give birth to the minor. Administrative responsibility rested with Julie Peteet, a cultural anthropologist and department chair. She explains that about four years ago students began requesting courses in forensics, probably sparked by CBS's CSI television series. So DiBlasi, who as staff archeologist has identified remains at abandoned cemeteries, assisted the state forensics anthropologist on cases and helped the police in other investigations, offered a course in skeletal forensics.
"This course would enroll very quickly and it would close. So we thought, well there's demand here," Peteet says. DiBlasi added an advanced course, "and from there it just kind of snowballed."
But before taking the proposal to the curriculum committee, Peteet asked Christopher Tillquist, now the program's adviser, to develop the bare bones idea into a comprehensive minor. He crafted a combination of chemistry, biology and other courses that included molecular techniques for doing anthropology such as DNA analysis.
Despite the inspiration of CSI ("I hate that show," says DiBlasi in his typically direct manner), forensic anthropology is more than grimly determined, model-like investigators solving big city crimes. "It is any level of analysis that lends an understanding of a criminal act that can be used in medical-legal or legal action."
As such, his profession has led the professor to some odd corners of the criminal world, such as helping convict people who sell the remains of American Indians, which is a felony.
In one case, an undercover FBI agent purchased two skulls from a suspect and turned them over to DiBlasi for investigation. He carefully measured the evidence and plugged the numbers into a computer program called ForDisc.
"I did the metric analysis and literally had the stuff back within four hours," he says. "I had a 99 percent probability of one [American Indian] male and one female." He notes with satisfaction, "The suspect pled on the evidence."
Some of his abandoned cemetery work has little or nothing to do with crime. While perhaps less glamorous, it is no less important to history and to relatives. At the other extreme, in recent years forensic investigators have performed some of their most important, and gruesome, work.
Explains Peteet, "Forensic anthropologists have been involved for the last decade excavating massacre sites in Guatemala, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq and Sri Lanka, working on genocidal issues and allowing families to put some closure on trauma and on identifying family members who have been murdered."
To read the various clues that can be revealed by the human frame takes training. Which brings us back to DiBlasi's laboratory. "This is the most fun lab," he explains, "because all the labs to this point have been long bones and pelvises and stuff like that. And now I have examples of decapitation, extra normal mastication--using your teeth as a vise. Just all sorts of neat things we see--cut marks on bones, butchering marks, neat disease." As an example of "neat disease" he demonstrates some bones decimated by tertiary syphilis.
Some of his more graphic but popular lectures include, "Why you don't put a loaded shotgun in your mouth" ("Because I show very graphically what it does to the human skull"); "What happens when grandma dies in a house full of cats and dogs" ("Carnivore marks are essentially the same indoors as out of doors"); and of course, the section on dismembering, which DiBlasi calls "power tool time," covering the different marks made by, say, hacksaws versus chainsaws.
By all reports, his students are thoroughly engaged by the material--even Keene, who admits that she doesn't watch horror movies or read Stephen King novels because they scare her. Yet, she says, "I'm happiest now that I'm studying forensics than I've ever been in my life." She credits this happiness to DiBlasi and his skeletal forensics class, in which she found her calling.
"He wants you to learn for the enjoyment of learning," she says, adding, "He always has intriguing anecdotes to go with the body parts you're studying."
After learning about the humanity, justice and respect that forensics anthropologists return to the deceased upon whom mortal sins have been inflicted, it's not hard to understand why students become so fascinated by the minor.
Sounding much less like a graduate essay, Keene recalls, "I was sitting here on Sept. 11 and I knew that's what people (forensic anthropologists) would be doing in the future--identifying remains for their loved ones."
The young woman who's afraid to see horror movies and read Stephen King novels is not afraid to look at life and death down to the bones. "I know with my abilities and training I could help people in the future."
Michael Jackman ('94 GA) is a freelance writer and radio commentator who lives in Louisville. Contact him through his Web site, www.mjfreelancer.com.
