Friday, July 8 – Day 14 Law and Order: Forensic Style. Today was the final day of our field school; a culmination of three weeks’ worth of hands on learning and documentation. Each of us got to be experts in a particular field – I got to be a crime scene manager. I had to…
Thursday, July 7 – Day 13 On our last day in the classroom, we finished matching the biological profiles of the remains we had recovered at Waterman Farms to a collection of missing person reports. After that, we processed the bodies, which entailed photographing the skeletons, first clothed, then removing the clothing and photographing them…
Wednesday, July 6 – Day 12 Today’s class started out at the Franklin County Coroner’s Office. The morgue supervisor took us on a tour of the facility. He showed us where the bodies are stored before the autopsies are done, and also explained how the paperwork is done to maintain the chain of custody. We…
Tuesday, July 5 – Day 11 Today was bug-tastic. We spent the morning with Dr Shetlar, an entomologist at Ohio State. There was a road-kill specimen that was laid out in the field for us a few days before, so after the lecture we went outside and collected maggot specimens. When we got back inside…
Friday, July 7 – Day 10 The outdoor scene excavation is done! The second week has come and gone and now we are getting down to the wire. Today we finished excavating the burial features from yesterday by mapping a plan and profile for the depths of the bottom of the burial. Setting this up…
Thursday, June 30 – Day 9 So today began the real work of the field school–excavating the bodies! We began by deciding on the best spot to set up our 2×2 meter grid and then we got to work. Our first task after setting up the grid was to map an outline of our feature…
Wednesday, June 29 – Day 8 After a short recap of yesterday’s forensic archaeology lecture, the team headed out to Waterman Farm, where we became acquainted with our outdoor crime scene. After setting up our equipment, a team of canine search and rescue dogs and handlers came to tell us all about how they train…
Tuesday, June 28 – Day 7 Day seven consisted of continuing our work from the indoor crime scene by processing all of the evidence that we collected. We dusted for fingerprints and sent our evidence to the lab to be tested for DNA and identification. This took up a majority of our time because it…
Monday, June 27 – Day 6 Today was another long day of work. We first looked at our dental casts that we started the previous week, and then Darcie gave us a recap of forensic odontology. Afterward, we headed to our indoor crime scene. We broke up into pairs and went to our designated room…
Friday, June 24 – Day 5 Wow, Week One is officially in the books. Today, Captain Rose came back again to teach us about crime scene photography. Although everyone had point-and-shoot cameras, we learned how to make certain changes to settings such as white balance, aperture size, and shutter speed in order to take the…