You Get Used to It: Internship at a Forensic Anthropology Research Facility
During the spring semester of 2017, I participated in an internship with the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (FACTS), where I collected preliminary data to be later used in research concerning identification of human remains through aerial photography or concerning remote sensing of human remains. After providing an overview of FACTS, this report will describe my internship activities.
The Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State is a multifaceted center comprising a body donation program, the outdoor Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF), the Osteological Research and Processing Laboratory (ORPL), and the Grady Early Forensic Anthropology Research Laboratory (GEFARL). During my time as an intern, I spent most of my time at FARF and ORPL, both of which are located 7 miles from campus on Freeman Ranch.
FARF is a 26-acre outdoor human decomposition research facility used by students, researchers, and law enforcement agencies. The facility is the largest of its kind in the world and serves as the location of many projects and experiments regarding postmortem interval, human decomposition, entomological involvement in decomposition, and various other subjects. On this 26-acre stretch of land, willed-body-donors begin the journey of decomposition by becoming part of various projects. Through these projects, researchers have been able to study rates, patterns, and sequences of human decay for regions with similar climate to that of Texas— which differ markedly from rates and outcomes in less-arid regions such as Tennessee (Shirley et al. 2011). The donations also serve as teaching materials for the various training courses that take place at the facility year-round. In this facility, students and law enforcement officers can learn recovery procedures for human remains; it is also here where canines are trained to be cadaver dogs. Since the facility is the home to over 100 bodies in various stages of decomposition, this location is ideal for training dogs to detect the many effluvial scents produced by decomposing human cadavers. After a body has completely decomposed, it is first inventoried, then transported to ORPL where it is to be processed.
The Osteology Research and Processing Laboratory or ORPL, where I spent most of my internship, is a small building consisting of a multi-purpose classroom, offices, an osteology laboratory, and a storage area. The multi-purpose classroom is the venue for the lecture portion of training courses, which take place year-round. The courses vary in topic. Topics include human recovery, facial reconstruction, and cadaver dog training. Beyond the multipurpose classroom lies an office within the laboratory, which serves as the workspace for Operation Identification, a project dedicated to the identification and repatriation of migrant workers who died along the Texas-Mexico-border. The laboratory portion of ORPL serves as a processing center for the will-body donation program and for the invaluable Operation Identification. In the lab is where the decomposed remains of the bodies originating from FARF are cleaned, labeled, and inventoried by Texas State students. The students vary in seniority, ranging from second semester freshmen to graduate students, all of which possess knowledge of human osteology and of the proper handling and processing of osteological material. These belongings, which are stored on site, have been washed and photographed by student volunteers, interns, and Operation Identification staff. The personal items are then cataloged in an online NAMUS, where family members of the deceased can search through the belongings in order to identify those which may belong to their deceased loved one so they can begin the identification process and ultimately recover the remains of their loved one. Once all the osteological material has been processed, inventoried, and labeled, it is transported to GEFARL, where the osteological remains of the donated bodies—and only the donated bodies become a permanent part of the Texas State skeletal collection. The skeletal remains of deceased migrants are stored at ORPL where they wait to be identified and repatriated.
The Grady Early Forensic Anthropology Research Laboratory (GEFARL), a place I rarely visited during my internship, is the final destination of the skeletal remains of a will body donation. In this building equipment for 3D imaging, histomorphometry, and osteometry can be found, all of which is used for the study of forensic anthropology via our skeletal collection comprised of the willed-body-donations. This laboratory also contains the offices of Dr. Daniel Wescott and Sophia Mavroudas, the director and the coordinator of FACTS, respectively. These talented people were my internship advisors and the reason behind my rare visits to GEFARL.
A great aspect of being an intern at FACTS is the opportunity to be involved in different projects and activities. A project I was able to partake in was to serve as a translator as the Spanish network Univision toured the facilities on Freeman Ranch. The anchor for a news program interviewed the FACTS faculty about Operation Identification and about the operations of the ORPL. I too was interviewed about my participation in Operation Identification and all the interviews were broadcast on the popular Spanish news program Primer Impacto. The activity I participated while I was an intern was to put on a presentation over forensic anthropology and FACTS for a group of high schoolers. Many opportunities are presented to interns throughout the semester these were two of my favorites.
On the last weekend of March, I found myself in the multipurpose classroom at the Osteology Research and Processing Laboratory surrounded by students from universities in Alabama and Florida. The room was abuzz with excitement and curiosity as Dr. Wescott walked toward the front of the classroom. As the projection screen slowly rolled down and the projector powered on, Dr. Wescott introduced himself to the visiting students and welcomed them and myself to the two-day human recovery course. The two-day human recovery course is an opportunity that is offered free of charge to all FACTS interns and is a great way to gain excavation experience, which is important in the field of forensic anthropology. Half of Saturday was spent in two ways. First, in the multipurpose classroom, a lecture was given over forensic anthropology and the procedures for excavating a body in a way that saves the integrity of the grave and at the same time allows an anthropologist to gather as much information as possible in order to aide in a forensic investigation if need be. After the lecture, the students were broken up into groups to facilitate rotation around the classroom to several stations where students could practice the procedures they were just taught. Once everyone had visited all the training stations, we were transported to the FARF and split into groups and given an excavation site. My excavation site is full of vegetation, so my group and I had to carefully remove all vegetation so as to be able to obtain a clear view of the excavation site. Once the excavation site was determined and gridded, my group and I, using the information we had learned in the multipurpose classroom, began slowly removing soil layer by layer from our grave. As more and more dirt was removed from our grave, we recorded everything we found, even a old balloon and used hand warmers packet. Once our skeleton was discovered, everyone took turns excavating around the bones and screening the dirt that was removed from our graves. Tragedy struck when I, after ten minutes of careful and slow brushing, stroked the left clavicle a bit too hard and crumbled it into hundreds of pieces. After what seemed like a lifetime of panic and worry, I realized that the bone I had been brushing for over ten minutes was not bone but a stick with the shape of a clavicle. The rest of the course went smoothly and all graves were excavated successfully by all the students.
Recording temperatures was the focus of my project during my time as an intern. The purpose of the temperature recordings was to ascertain the optimal time for a thermal imaging camera to be able to capture the heat signature of a cadaver. Twice a week, I would visit the FARF three times a day, morning, noon, and evening. During these times, I would record the surface temperature of several cadavers using an infrared thermometer. The cadaver temperature recordings were taken from the head, torso, thigh, and “decomposition island”that forms around the cadaver as it begins to decompose and the cadaver begins to produce decomposition fluids which exit the body through orifices and seep into the ground. Ambient temperature and ground temperatures at a control site and near the individual cadavers were also recorded.
When a person dies, they lose the ability to retain heat and so upon death, the body begins cooling. This cooling process is known as algor mortis. During algor mortis, the body cools to a temperature that matches or is beneath the ambient temperature. The way in which a body produces a heat signature is clearly not through the process of homeostasis as it does during life, but rather through the various stages of decomposition. Algor mortis is the cooling of the body temperature and occurs very soon after death; however, other processes of decomposition create heat, which allows the body to have a heat signature. What creates heat within the body is the mixture of several processes, most importantly is the process of autolysis, putrefaction, and the presence of larval masses (DesMarais 2014). Through the mixture of these processes, a body is able to raise postmortem body temperature and produce enough heat to be captured with thermal imaging.
My temperature recordings were superficial, in that I only used an infrared thermometer and recorded surface temperatures. I did not use thermal imaging, nor did I use a probe thermometer to measure internal temperatures of the bodies. That being said, I observed two things. The first observation I made was that the bodies that were still in the process of decomposing offered the highest temperature readings throughout the day. My second observation was that the best times to capture the heat signature of bodies were in the morning or in the evening; it was during these times that the temperatures of the bodies contrasted the most to the surrounding ground temperature.
In conclusion, the time I spent as an intern for FACTS was amazing and I highly recommend every anthropology student to seek out an internship in their respective field of interest. The internships at FACTS allow students to gain hands on experience and it also allows students to meet many interesting people including faculty, graduate students, and fellow anthropology undergraduates that the students would have not otherwise met. This internship has given me the opportunity to network and to gain hands on experience in the field I have chosen to be the focus of my career; and so I have only benefitted through my experiences as an intern for FACTS.
Literature Cited
- DesMarais, Angel M. “Detection of cadaveric remains by thermal imaging cameras.”Journal of Forensic Identification 5 (2014): 489.
- Shirley, Natalie R., Rebecca J. Wilson, and Lee Meadows Jantz. “Cadaver use at the University of Tennessee’s anthropological research facility.”Clinical Anatomy 3 (2011): 372-380.