Researchers wanted to bury the 10 bodies on the south bank of Fort Loudoun Lake. They had to do it by hand.
The brush, though bare in winter, was too dense and too sloped for machines. Instead, scientists in February cleared a path leading to the spot where, shovel by shovel, they dug four holes.
One grave now holds the piled remains of six people. Another holds three, and another a single body.
A fourth was dug out and then refilled only with dirt, a control for the experiment.
For the next three years University of Tennessee scientists will monitor these fresh burial sites from the sky, from the ground, through sampling and in different light spectrums to determine if the mass graves can be detected from afar.
If the remote sensing technology they plan to use works, it could mean huge gains in the ability to uncover clandestine graves around the world and to prosecute the killers.
“Mass graves are the most profound example of evil, and you may not be able to get away with it much longer if we can make this work,” said Michael Medler, a geography professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., who helped conceive the project nearly a decade ago.
Medler is close friends with lead UT researcher Amy Mundorff, who is perhaps best known in her field for helping to identify the remains of some of the thousands of victims of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. She has been at UT three years, and she took the job with the hope that she could finally pursue this dream project.
The bodies being used for the unique experiment are all among donations made to UT’s internationally famous Forensic Anthropology Center, or the “Body Farm.”
It is the oldest and most established of a handful of research facilities around the country dedicated to studying the decomposition of human remains. Before now, research at the facility has been mostly used to help law enforcement and to facilitate domestic criminal cases.
If this broader, global experiment succeeds, it could propel the reputation of the university and its anthropology department to greater heights.
Exposing atrocities
Evidence of the horrors humans commit against each other exists in nearly every region of the world.
In Guatemala, three decades after his bloody dictatorship, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt is currently on trial concerning accusations that he sent soldiers to rape and kill thousands of Mayan villagers.
In Argentina, a forensic anthropology team trained by U.S. experts is still recovering and identifying the “Los Desaparecidos,” citizens accused of being Marxists who went missing during the country’s “Dirty War” of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Human-rights investigators are searching for victims in Libya, Sudan and Syria, where ongoing civil wars and genocide threaten the safety of both citizens and visitors trying to help them.
Some investigators already use before-and-after satellite images and ground-penetrating radar to find clues about possible graves, said Stefan Schmitt, director of the international forensic program with the U.S.-based Physicians for Human Rights.
“Remote sensing has always been a really big interest, especially as technology becomes more and more accessible,” Schmitt said. “But the problem is that it’s not definitive. You can show me the picture, and I can’t say anything until I get in there and dig a hole.
“Technology has always been limited by that step where you have to go in, and that makes a difference in places like Darfur (in Sudan) or Syria or other places where there are allegations of mass graves.”
UT researchers concede there may never be certainty that the blips that show up in the images are human graves. But they hope that by using multiple kinds of technology, they can at least predict them with higher probability.
When the International Commission on Missing Persons was established in Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of the 1996 G7 Summit in France, it and other human-rights groups made a chilling discovery: When investigators got too close, someone would dig up the graves of victims killed in the Balkans conflict and move them. Teams were using satellite images to track the movements of the graves, but it wasn’t always successful.
While the images can pick up large graves filled with hundreds of people, it’s more difficult to locate the more common plots with 10 or 20 or 30 bodies, said Dawnie Steadman, director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at UT who has also done extensive human-rights work in Argentina, Cyprus and Spain.
“So the focus of this project is on those smaller graves and trying to see if we can get the acumen of the technology to be that fine-grained,” said Steadman, whose role in the project is more of a logistics coordinator. “Are they only sensitive over fresh graves, and do we lose that sensitivity over time?
“If there’s a no-fly zone and we can’t get airplanes in there to do this technology, we’re still dependent on satellites. But what technology is going to be useful (in the field) depends on how long it’s been and how old we think the grave is,” Steadman said.
If forensic investigators can find the clandestine graves early on, they can monitor them using this technology even as the conflict on the ground wages on. When it’s safer to enter the country, organizations will know exactly where to look for the victims, said Mundorff.
To do this, UT is looking to cross-reference at least two kinds of remote sensing.
One technology, LiDAR, which is short for Light Detection and Ranging, uses a laser to trace the contours on the ground and look for subtle elevation changes. Initially, mass graves appear as mounds after they’re dug, but over time, as the human remains decompose, depressions form in the ground.
Related document: Graphic illustrating how LiDAR scanner technology is used in the detection of mass graves
The other technology, multi-spectral imagery, can look at what’s being reflected off the ground in different light spectra, such as blue, green, red, infrared and so forth. Different materials are reflected across the spectrum with specific signatures, said Katie Corcoran, a lead graduate student at UT who is using the project for her dissertation.
“If you know vegetation looks a certain way, but in this image it looks different, maybe that’s because it’s disturbed,” Corcoran said. “And then on top of that is a layer of LiDAR data that shows an elevation difference, maybe a mound or a depression, and it happens to be the same spot. You can say maybe that this is a manmade disturbance. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to say this is a grave.”
The bulk of Medler’s work at Western Washington has been in studying landscapes after forest fires, something with no obvious link to identifying the remains of dead people, Mundorff’s specialty.
But to do wildfire reconstructions, Medler has used the very technology now at work at the Body Farm.
They first compared their expertise during dinner while both were living on the East Coast. Medler is a college friend of Mundorff’s husband, Kurt.
Dawnie Steadman, director of the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center, maps a grave containing a donor’s remains in February. The mass-grave research project will observe the bodies for three years, detecting changes in the ground and looking at multispectral imagery.
When Mundorff left the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to pursue her doctorate in Canada, those talks evolved over camping trips.
They brainstormed ideas while climbing granite massifs in Squamish, British Columbia’s outdoors mecca. They would nail down details at the pub afterward.
“We ended up talking about doing a project to look at clandestine graves, and (Medler) suggested using LiDAR, which had never been done before,” Mundorff said.
They considered different methodologies — using existing mass graves versus creating their own. They looked for funding, but struggled to find a grant that matched their criteria.
Medler even had a graduate student plotting on a map mass graves around the world. They talked of Mundorff joining Western Washington as an adjunct faculty member just to get the project rolling. But without funding or a facility where they could conduct the experiment, the project stalled.
Tennessee, however, had the facility, the resources and the interest in helping Mundorff launch a mass-grave project. UT even had a newly-acquired, untouched piece of land adjacent to the existing Body Farm. Fresh land was needed to be sure the technology doesn’t pick up chemical remnants of previous bodies.
Mundorff got the offer from UT during the spring of 2009 and arrived the following January.
Not long after, she got an email from Katie Corcoran, an anthropologist working for the Seminole Tribe in Florida to recover cultural artifacts on its land. Corcoran was familiar with LiDAR from her work in Florida and had recently read an article on researchers at her alma mater, the University of Central Florida, who were using the technology to detect Mayan ruins hidden in the Belize jungle.
A mentor suggested Corcoran look up Mundorff, who had already made a name for herself in the anthropology field.
In that 2009 email, the Floridian pitched almost the exact same project that Mundorff had been privately mulling for nearly 10 years. Corcoran soon found herself heading to Knoxville to continue her studies. The project’s foundation had been formed.
Early days
It takes three wrong turns, two phone calls and an argument with Google Maps to eventually find the Body Farm.
That’s intentional.
A brick building with an A-frame roof sits on the South Knoxville site near the University of Tennessee Medical Center hidden from view of the access road. Immediately behind the building is a fence. Behind the fence is the plot of land that hosts UT’s new research project.
The closely guarded swath of land on the banks of Fort Loudoun Lake is unremarkable, covered with fallen hardwoods, discarded oak leaves and poison ivy. There’s a steep incline as the ridge slopes down to the water’s edge.
Once Mundorff arrived at UT, it took another two years to get the mass-graves project under way. There was a change of leadership at the Forensic Anthropology Center, which turned out to be promising for the initiative because it included a new director with heavy interest in human rights — Steadman. But delays in 2011 and 2012 in getting the fence built around the new land also created hiccups because the work would have to be put through a public bidding process.
By the time the fence quietly went up in January, Mundorff had been at UT for three years and Corcoran had been a graduate student for almost two.
The down time, however, also helped the experiment and concept to expand significantly, cutting across various departments.
Now, two molecular anthropology graduate students are working on a DNA co-mingling project to see if it’s possible for the genetic material of two people to seep into and contaminate each other’s remains, which would make it difficult to identify victims.
Two agriculture professors will study the soil ecology as bodies in the graves break down. Another is cataloguing plant species in the area to see if they change as the decomposition releases nitrogen into the environment.
When the project’s three years are up, the facility will do a workshop for international workers on how to excavate mass graves. It’s a course that has only been offered with animal remains — never with humans.
“As she developed this project, (Mundorff) wanted to make it as robust as possible, to have as many different technologies and researchers involved as possible,” Steadman said.
But there is still one looming obstacle: money.
The project needs about $200,000, possibly more.
Corcoran hoped to receive a grant from a private company to do the multi-spectral imaging, and she and Mundorff hope to receive access to ground LiDAR technology from a resource outside the university.
But the group still needs funding to test the soil and plant samples they collect and to gather aerial LiDAR scans that could be more precise and in line with what would be used in the field. A pilot study Mundorff recently completed could be the key to the funding they need.
To boost her theory that buried corpses release nitrogen into the surrounding soil and vegetation — and that those chemicals are visible to the remote sensing technologies — Mundorff has already conducted a small-scale pilot study.
In January 2011, she buried one body at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility at Texas State University, San Marcos.
To conduct the baseline study, Mundorff needed land that had never hosted decomposing bodies before, and UT still hadn’t erected the fence for the new land here. The Texas State facility, however, was founded only five years ago and has a largely untouched 26 acres.
So, Mundorff paid a graduate student in San Marcos to monitor the site weekly over several months. Once the body was buried, however, Texas was hit with one of the worst droughts in recent memory, slowing the regrowth of vegetation around the grave. The results from her first batch of 37 samples were lackluster.
“I sent off samples initially and got results that seemed like there might be something there, but it wasn’t as clear of a pattern as we had hoped,” Mundorff said.
Disappointed but not discouraged, she waited longer, this time submitting 100 plant samples collected over 18 months to see if the nitrogen levels had increased. If significant nitrogen changes couldn’t be found in the samples, there was no chance that it could be picked up remotely. If it can be picked up remotely, though, it’s important to verify it chemically, Mundorff said.
“We sent off a bunch (of samples) from a little bit later in the project when things were really growing back better, and that’s when we got our awesome results,” she said. Her final samples were taken in August, a year and a half after the body was buried.
Though the findings are still being analyzed, the new results could show that the research team is headed in the right direction. The results could also help raise money to finance the rest of the project.
Mundorff will be replicating in Knoxville much of what she did in Texas on a larger scale. She will collect plant samples for processing and monitor the site with regular photographs. Corcoran, meanwhile, will collect data from additional LiDAR and multi-spectral scans, which the researchers hope to do at least once a year, if not more frequently. Other researchers will monitor the soil with additional samples and keep tabs on new or changing plant species.
The project may also expand beyond UT’s facility.
To prove the technology’s effectiveness when applied in real-world conflicts, researchers want to replicate it in another climate, possibly at the Texas State facility. Options are limited because only a few body farms exist in the U.S.
Mundorff has some ideas, though, and hopes to start a joint experiment in the near future, depending on funding.
Medler, meanwhile, also plans to do an applied version of the UT experiment — that is, using the same technology over known existing mass graves that have yet to be dug up.
Medler hopes the U.S. government will declassify older images of known mass grave sites from satellites and other remote technology. Those baseline images could be compared to new LiDAR and multi-spectral images to see if the mass graves show up.
In the meantime, though he’s thousands of miles away, Medler will continue to serve as a consultant on the project at UT and perhaps help interpret data.
Technology is becoming more advanced and more affordable so quickly that if this team of researchers can prove it works, applying it internationally could happen in “years, not decades,” he said.
“The most exciting part of the project is conceptually making it harder for people to feel like they can get away with these things, even decades later,” Medler said. “Because we will see it.”
Sunday 14 April 2013
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/apr/14/body-of-evidence-ut-using-donated-corpses-in/
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