Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

continental scale. Before the last ice age the Missouri actually flowed northeast into Canada, emptying into the icy waters of Hudson Bay. Then, when the glaciers swept down like mighty earthmovers to reshape the land, the Missouri saw an opening and veered southward, running for the warm waters off Mexico and ending up some 2,000 miles from its original outlet.

Over the ages, the Missouri has witnessed dramatic changes in the life-forms inhabiting its vast watershed. A hundred million years or so ago, dinosaurs ranged across Montana and the Dakotas. They were succeeded by a host of warm-blooded creatures, including cheetahs, camels, woolly mammoths, and huge saber-toothed cats. We humans are relative newcomers: The first inhabitants of the Great Plains might have crossed a land bridge from Asia some 12,000 years ago.

For millennia these aboriginal Americans led a nomadic existence. Then, about 2,000 years ago, most of them began raising food crops and putting down roots. They built villages of earth lodges: round structures dug into the ground, topped with a domelike wood framework, then covered with earth and sod to insulate against the prairie’s scorching summers and frigid winters. Today we’d call that “earth-sheltered housing.” The Plains Indians just called it “home.”

But the earth-lodge villages weren’t sustainable. Trees are scarce on the prairie. They grow mainly in the river’s lowest floodplain—what’s called the “first terrace”—so after a generation or so the riverbank for miles upstream and downstream of a village would be stripped bare. The women, whose job it was to gather fuel and building materials, had to walk increasing, exhausting distances for wood. Eventually they would put their weary feet down, and the tribe would resettle a few dozen miles upriver or downriver in a fresh stretch of cottonwoods. A hundred years later, once the floodplain had reforested, they might circle back to the site of a village their ancestors had abandoned.

By the 1700s, the Great Plains were home to numerous Indian tribes. Four major tribes inhabited and fought over the northern Plains: the fearsome Sioux, who remained nomadic, and the sedentary Mandans, Hidatsa, and Arikara. In what is now central South Dakota, the Arikara built immense earth-lodge villages encompassing hundreds of family houses and large ceremonial lodges.

Then came the wave of the future: white explorers and fur traders. Lewis and Clark were among them, though they were far from the first. When the Corps of Discovery dropped anchor at a Mandan village in 1804, they were met by blond-haired, blue-eyed Mandans—the offspring of native women and French explorers or trappers.

On their journey upriver into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, Lewis and Clark attempted to unite the Arikara and the Mandans in a three-way alliance with the U.S. government to oppose the Sioux, but the Arikara resisted the coalition-building and in fact skirmished briefly with the expedition as it continued upstream. The explorers fared much better with the Mandans: The Corps of Discovery wintered over with the Mandans that year, trading and hunting with the Mandan men and sharing the sexual favors of the Mandan women. Often this was done with the encouragement of the women’s husbands, who believed that their wives would receive, and then transmit, the whites’ “magic.” Unfortunately, what was usually transmitted was syphilis.

On their return downriver in 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition again clashed with the Arikara; in 1809, Meriwether Lewis—during an ill-fated term as governor of the Louisiana Territory—sent an army of some five hundred whites and Indians back up the Missouri with orders to exterminate the Arikara if they were spoiling to fight.

But for all their bravado, the Arikara were teetering on the brink of extinction. Within half a century of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, the Arikara had all but vanished: victims of the Sioux, the settlers, and smallpox. The tribe’s decimation left behind, on the second and third terraces of the Missouri, hundreds of empty earth lodges and thousands of occupied graves.

In 1957, as the last traces of the Arikara civilization were about to slip beneath the waters of progress, the Smithsonian Institution sent me out to help excavate as much as possible in the little time remaining.

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM of Natural History is one of the great Smithsonian museums lining the Mall in Washington, D.C. On the main floor, beneath its huge rotunda, an enormous African elephant stands sentinel. Several floors above him—on balconies ringing the rotunda’s fourth, fifth, and sixth floors—cabinets and drawers and shelves brim with Native American skeletons. Or at least they used to.

Today, our thinking about excavating graves and collecting bones has changed radically. In 1990, after intense lobbying by Native American tribes, Congress passed a law that forbids the collection of Native American skeletal remains. The law also requires that museums and other institutions return Native American remains if those remains came from a tribe that still survives. The underlying philosophy is simple: The remains of the dead are sacred relics, not collectibles or exhibits, and they should be returned to their ancestral lands and buried with reverence. Spiritually, it makes perfect sense.

Scientifically, though, excavations and collections such as the Smithsonian’s have played a crucial role in illuminating the history, culture, and evolution of humans in general and Native Americans in particular. By comparing bones from thousands of individuals, scientists can draw an accurate picture of North America’s native inhabitants: their size, their strength, their diet, their average life span, infant mortality rates, and a wealth of other information. And in the latter 1950s and early ’60s, those bones were pouring into the Smithsonian faster than the museum’s scientists could process them.

That was lucky for me.

I HAD DISCOVERED anthropology during my last two years of undergraduate school at the University of Virginia. By then I had completed most of the requirements for my major, psychology, and finally had a few slots open for electives. As I scanned the course offerings, the first thing that caught my eye was “Anthropology.” (Not surprisingly, the list was alphabetical. If I’d started reading at the bottom instead of the