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

heat and the dust of the Missouri River terraces. Still others were taught by the ants and the rattlesnakes that burrowed into the plains with us. Every one of these lessons would serve me well in the years ahead as I began applying the secrets I learned from the long-dead to understanding the stories of the recently murdered.

BY THE TIME I arrived in South Dakota in August of 1957, the summer was almost over. In just two weeks the project would shut down so the professors and students could return to school. And in those two short weeks Stephenson hoped I could help answer a question that had been puzzling and frustrating him for the past two years: Where had the Arikara hidden their dead?

From the number of earth lodges being excavated, he knew the population of the village had numbered in the hundreds and that it had been occupied for decades. But so far Stephenson’s crew had managed to find only a few dozen sets of remains. So where were the rest?

Some Indian tribes, including the Sioux, put the bodies of the dead on elevated scaffolds to decompose in the open. It’s therefore rare to find an old Sioux skeleton, because the bones are often scattered by coyotes, vultures, and other scavengers. The Arikara, though, seemed consistent in their burial practices. The graves were usually dug by the women, digging with hoes made from the scapulae, or shoulder blades, of bison. It was tough work with a primitive tool; so, to keep the task manageable, they made the graves as small and compact as possible: They dug a round pit about three feet deep—smaller if the individual was a child or woman—and lowered the body into a flexed or fetal position, with the knees drawn up to the chest and the arms crossed. Then they filled in the pit; covered the top with sticks, logs, or brush to deter scavengers; and topped the wood with soil and sod.

By August of that second summer, Stephenson’s frustration was intense. Not only were the remains they’d found insufficient to account for the village’s population, they were also insufficient to teach us much about the Arikaras’ life and death. Stephenson was smart enough to know there must be an Arikara cemetery somewhere nearby. But if we didn’t find it soon, we’d lose our chance.

Archaeological digs are based on a grid pattern: A site is marked off into five-foot squares, which are excavated by removing very shallow layers of soil one at a time. Each grid is assigned an identifying number, so that as the dig progresses from one square to the next, the artifacts or remains found can be logged precisely according to which square they were found in and where within the square, both horizontally and by depth. It’s orderly, it’s precise, and it’s maddeningly slow—sometimes taking a week or more per square—so that an entire summer can be spent excavating an area just forty to fifty feet square. We had to cover lots more ground in lots less time. Stephenson put me in charge of a crew of ten students and urged me to find the Arikara dead before the end of the month.

It’s hot as blazes in South Dakota in August, and the prairie is a mighty big place to search. To do the job swiftly, we’d need a small army of workers. What we had, it turns out, was a very large army of very small workers: the ants burrowing into the prairie by the billions.

The soil of the Great Plains is called loess. Pronounced “lurss,” it’s from a German word meaning “loose.” Fine as flour, it’s what put the dust in the Dust Bowl. That’s in its dry state, of course; just add water, and its character changes drastically. Wet loess is quite possibly the slickest substance in the universe, and if it’s sitting atop wet shale—possibly the second slickest material on earth—things get really interesting: In utter defiance of the laws of physics, friction (and therefore traction) can vanish entirely. That’s why poor Bob Stephenson was so late when picking me up that first day.

Loess is tailor-made for ants. It’s soft and easy to dig through, but it holds together well, so once a worker ant has tunneled through it, he can be pretty sure his tunnel is not going to collapse anytime soon.

Even better than virgin loess, in the opinion of our industrious ant, is loess that’s been disturbed and loosened—for example, in the process of digging and filling in a grave. This is nice, easy digging down here, he thinks when he burrows into a burial. But wait a minute—what’s all this extra stuff? If it’s something too big to move, he detours around it. But if he can drag it, he hauls it up to the surface and chucks it outside.

One digger’s trash is another’s treasure. During my first few days in South Dakota, I spent a lot of time walking in a half-crouch through the prairie’s short grass and scrub. Most of the anthills were just piles of cast-off loess, with a few little pebbles thrown in for good measure. But eventually I began to spot other objects. Looking closer, I saw that they were tiny finger bones, weathered foot bones, and—most startling of all—flashes of brilliant color: blue glass beads, used in jewelry and as currency by the traders and Plains Indians two centuries ago. Digging one foot down, directly beneath several of these anthills, we found crumbling timbers used to close the graves. Jackpot! Fanning outward from the village, we plotted what looked to be the most promising concentration of these tiny grave markers placed by the ants. We began digging lines or rows of test squares running outward from the village site, no longer side by side but separated by five feet, sometimes ranging out twenty or even thirty feet from the prior squares.

That final, frantic push nearly killed the crew. But when it was done, we knew we’d found