This is my lab and what we do is study bones - human bones, specifically.
We have materials that can be very recent in time, all the way back to about 10,000
years old. My name is Kari Bruwelheide and I’m a forensic
anthropologist here at the Nation Museum of Natural History.
The bones are like a time capsule. They will preserve the evidence for as long as that
bone lasts. You have to know how to read them, but once you do, you can tell a whole bunch
of things that you would never think that would be revealed.
This is a skeleton that was excavated due to road construction. One of the most telling
features of age are the growth plates. On this humerus, this upper arm bone, you can
see that I can actually physically remove the proximal joint from the shaft of the bone
and I can do that because this area is a growth plate, and certain bones will complete their
growth at certain ages and because we’re familiar with the standards and the growth
process I know he’s probably not any older than about 16 years old. And so it’s really
pretty exciting the types of information that we can figure out, just from the skeleton.
This is an exhibit called Written In Bone, and this is an exhibit that really came out
of the research that I do here at the museum. The fun part about creating this exhibit was
we got to select the most interesting skeletons that we’ve studied from the colonial Chesapeake.
These are incredible stories and they’re what we call our colonial cold cases. But
we’ve read their skeletons and we’ve come up with who they were, how they lived and
in some cases how they died. It’s the closest we can come to the people that lived back
then, and no other evidence can tell us what we learn from the skeleton.
This skeleton, for example, I can look at the chemistry of his bones and tell you that
he’s a recent immigrant to America, he came here from Europe. I can tell you that he was
involved in heavy physical labor, from the markers I see on his bones. I can tell you
that his teeth were very poor, and that’s not from necessarily from eating sugar like
we do today, but it’s from poor enamel formation - he did not have adequate diet as a child.
So you put all these things together and you get a very detailed picture of his life, his
experience in history, and it’s one that I can guarantee was never written down in
any history book. You hear about John Smith, you hear about
Pocahontas, but who was everybody else that came here? Everybody learns about the colonial
period in school, but they don’t realize that the history is actively being excavated
and dug up and we’re still learning a lot about the people and how they lived and died.
Most people don’t realize that when they go through Written in Bone here at the museum
that only a couple of floors above them is our lab and the 30,000 skeletons that are
here at the museum, and we’re actively studying those skeletons. We’re actively doing forensic
casework here at the museum. When law enforcement contacts us, we work
with them to establish identity and to try and figure out the cause of death and any
evidence related to that. And as you can see, our lab is not like what you see on TV in
shows like bones or CSI where it’s very high tech, very fancy,
but we actually do much more interesting work, I think, and the stories and case that we
encounter are much more interesting. Every day, new discoveries are being made
and every day new technologies are being developed. We never used to even attempt to get DNA from
bones, even forensic cases, when I first started, and now it’s something people take for granted.
An intern today, when they finish their career, they are going to know two or three times
as much about the bones as we do today. That’s how quickly things are changing.
We always think of it as being an advocate for that person because they are no longer
able to tell their story. That’s very satisfying -it’s a very tangible way we feel that we
can contribute to society, even for the resolution of a forensic investigation, but also to get
a better understanding of history and the human story in that history.