On the Discovery channel in years past I’ve heard two references to a place known, either officially or unofficially, as the Body Farm, run by some department at, if memory serves, the University of Tennessee. They apparently experiment on cadavers for the sake of criminological knowledge. I’m interested as to what goes on there exactly and what sort of measures they have to partition off the area and keep out the morbidly curious.
Such a place is described in Patricia Cornwell’s novel titled, appropriately enough, The Body Farm.
Here’s something.
Hope this helps.
From: http://www.crimelibrary.com/forensics/anthropology/6.htm
Don’t know about the security measures they take, though.
Close. Postmortem interval.
Ah. Merci.
Here’s something more official, though no more informative.
Been there, smelled it, Have pictures.
Unofficially it is called Bills Aanthropological Research Field. BARF
After the founder Bill Bass the creator. Who has since retired.
Funny story how the place was started.
Dr. Bass was called out one evening to help identify a body found in an old cemetary. The general consensus on sight was that the body was only a few years old.
They (the police) had a theory that someone had used the old cemetary as a dumping sight for bodies.
Dr Bass estimated the body was IIRC less than 5 years deceased.
Imagine the embaressment when it was determined (the body) to be closer to 100 years old. The lab results turned out the body was that of a Civil War vet (a colonel was one of the first bodies to be enbalmed in the state of Tennesse. His body became exposed after the ground over his grave was washed away in a rain storm.
So, Dr Bass started the sight to measure the rate of decay in different situations and such.
Interesting place. You do get used to the smell after a while.
Osip
You actually worked there? How much space does it occupy? What sort of security measures do they have? I know they “store” corpses in cars and put them in coffins that allow them to collect the fluids produced by decomposition, but what other sorts of things do they do?
Thanks for your help, everyone.
Woops. Either one can’t edit one’s own posts here or I’m doing something wrong, but I noticed the reference to the size of the facility. Thanks.
I believe there is some more detail on this facility in one (or maybe both) of these books (not at home right now so I can’t check) “Witnesses from the Grave” and “Dead Man do Tell Tales”. If you’re at all interested in forensics, these are great books to start with. I’ve always kinda had a hankering to visit the place, but I don’t know if they give tours to people walking in off the street.
There was a fairly detailed article on it in the Washington Post (couple years ago?). You could try searching their archives—you’d probably have to pay for the full text though.
Actually I was a forensics Major at JSU (Jacksonville State University) IN Alabama. We had a field trip to visit the sight and meet Dr Bass.
They do all kinds of stuff with a corpes. They try to find and document as many different senarios of the how the body decays. Clothed or unclothed, in water or out of water, wraped in plastic or left in the open air. In cars both in the cab or in the trunk.
** Booklover, ** I am not sure where you are geographically, but check with any forensic or criminal justice instructors and see if they take field trips to the place. You could also call and ask if it is possible if you were able to join a “student” tour at some point and time.
It has been almost 7 years since I have been there. Was a very facinating and interesting experience.
Is this the place where they figured out how to tell how long a corpse has been there by the developmental stages of all the maggots that are crawling on it?
The chronology of decomposition had been fairly well established before the Body Farm (I prefer my monicker, above, for the place)was built.
Insect larvae go through defined developmental stages (called Instars)on the path from egg to puppa. The timing of these instars depends on the species and environmental conditions, mainly temperature.
As regards flies, various species arrive at a fresh body at different times, a kind of dipteran “succession.”
Forensic entomologists knew about these things early in the 20th Century. Maggotville research mostly refined the timetables to account for different post-mortem environments. Important work, of course, for the modern sleuths…