I’d like to start off my account of today by saying I looked very cute. I left my hair curly and had a hat on. I got several comments. I only bring this up to a. make myself feel nice and b. explain why I was so darn productive today. I’m unusually productive on cute days. It also may have been the four cups of coffee. So. The day started off well. We had a team meeting and decided our tasks and all that. Jennifer and I started the day by attempting to get an estimate of the stature of our victim (Sheila). We measure all the long bones and found tables with equations to plug these measurements into. The problem with this was we needed to know the geographic history of our person for these tables to be of any use. So, we set about the next task of trying to figure out the ethnicity of our skeleton. This is a tricky thing to do since most anthropologists are really against the idea of race in general, and so most people don’t publish how to figure it out. Even then, most measurements re pretty subjective. This being said, it took us a long while to find a source t use and then to figure it out since our person had really mixed traits and some kept pointing to European ancestry whilst others were Asian and African American. It was all quite confusing. Eventually, we decided that most traits leaned toward white, and we determined her stature range to be 146cm – 155cm, with a mean of 150.17cm, making her about 5’3”.
Natalie is our team leader for a reason. She’s amazing and intelligent. I say this because she always has brilliant ideas. Sheila, hen we dug her up, had her wrists and ankles bound with zip ties. When we got our real skeleton, there were cut marks on the lateral and medial edges of tibias, fibulas, radii, and on the articulating carpals of both hands. We wanted to know if the zip ties could make these marks if the victim, while living, had struggled against her restraints good deal. So, Natalie bought pigs feet and zip ties. This lead to Jennifer and I spending a large part of our mornings on the lawn with gloves on, pulling on bound pigs feet, trying to see if the zip ties cut through flesh or left mark on bone (one side was fleshed and the other was not). This would have been fine if the feed hadn’t smelled like awful and if it hadn’t been a new student orientation day. Regardless, after much laboring, we determined the marks on the bones couldn’t be made from zip ties. So what were they? Did someone attempt to disarticulate our victim? Did she pull a Mad Max and try to cut the ties off and in turn cut herself? Heidi and Nick let us ponder this question for several hours of our precious lab time before having mercy on us and telling us the marks were from the processing of the skeleton. Because that’s not important information they should have given us at the beginning. It’s not like we wasted a whole morning or anything. It’s not like I had to pull on smelly slimy pigs feet or no reason. It’s not like they took pictures. That’s fine. I got to be king of the lab for a day. So there.
I finished mapping today, which felt really good. After that, I didn’t really know what to do with myself so I started examining the skeleton more closely. I noticed not all the epiphyseal lines on the sacrum were fused, and I wondered if that could help determine age, since they fuse top to bottom. Turns out they can and through some extra research I narrowed the age range from 19-34 to 24-25. Neat. I also noticed a gap at the distal end of the medial sacral crest, which is where the neural arched off the last five lumbar vertebrae fuse together to form a protective sheath for the end of the spinal chord. Generally, this is called spnia bifida and leads to great pain, but this was really minor, so I was doing some research and it turns out it’s only a sacral hiatus. Cool. It’s not really important, but I learned something. We also did some more evidence analysis and some blood tests. We’re all really confused since the blunt force trauma to the face and head of Sheila look as if they would have lead to quite a bit of blood, and yet there is very little on any of the clothing. We’re not sure what’s up with that.
I spent some of the afternoon writing up my part of the final report and starting the PowerPoint and works cited for everyone. We all ended the day by deciding how to date the postmortem interval. Tomorrow shall be grand, I’m sure.
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