This skeleton is one of over 150 subjects at UT Knoxville’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility — also known as the “Body Farm.”

By Leigh Powell and Jay Mayfield

In a wooded area on the outskirts of the city, four bodies have been discovered by law enforcement agents. The agents carefully exhume the remains, searching for clues as to how long the bodies have been there and what might have led to their demise.

This is not a grisly murder scene, nor is it the opening shot of an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Rather, it is a glimpse into life at one of UT Knoxville’s most unique research facilities.

Opened in Knoxville in 1980, the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility is run by UT Knoxville’s Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences. Inside the facility’s gates, donated bodies are studied: How does decomposition take place, and how do physical conditions affect the process? What are the biochemical effects of decomposition? How does entomology come into play?

And how can this scientific information be applied to real-world events?

The outdoor facility, often called “the Body Farm,” is unparalleled in the world in the opportunities it offers for study of the human body and how it decomposes. No other facility offers scientists or law enforcement access to human remains for these types of studies.

The use of human remains lends a seriousness to the proceedings at a program like the Outdoor Recovery Course, a week-long training for members of law enforcement. Built on information gleaned from the more than 25 years of research conducted at the facility, it provides an authenticity that the participants value.

Gillian White is one such participant. A senior forensic technician in New Zealand, she traveled to Knoxville for the Outdoor Recovery Course. “This course is so unique in its approach,” White says. “We’re digging up a human body. In New Zealand we’d never be allowed to do this. There we use pigs — but even with that, there’s a limited availability, only for entomology students.”

Research at the facility is multi-faceted, but points back to the questions that are of top relevance to detectives: how to detect a body’s presence, how to determine how long a body has been dead and how best to identify the body. The answers come from everything from analyzing animal bite marks on bone to a complex database that is shedding new light on the nature of modern humans.

That database is built from measurements and information taken both from the skeletons left after bodies decompose at the facility and information given to the facility by a body donor or their family. By compiling the information of hundreds of bodies, the Forensic Anthropology Center has created what is, in essence, a reference guide that can connect the information from an unidentified body to a range of attributes that may help identify a body.

In the process, the resources that the center has generated have raised the profile and role of forensic anthropologists in law enforcement.

At the outdoor course, visiting investigator Dana Bee holds up a small, gray “stone” found inside the grave to demonstrate the need for forensic anthropologists as part of the law enforcement team. “An anthropologist knows this is a bone from the hand — I probably would have tossed it,” he says.

Lee Meadows Jantz, the center’s coordinator, says the center’s research has led to training that benefits society through helping law enforcement solve more crimes.

“We’re not trying to turn law enforcement officers into anthropologists,” Jantz says, “but we’re trying to give them the tools to recover remains. We’re helping them learn how to be careful, how to appreciate the subtleties.”

All of UT’s forensic anthropology efforts are about contributing to the existing body of knowledge on the subject matter. In doing so, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has become the go-to source for matters of forensics, both in the world of law enforcement and in the world of research.

“Researchers from around the world travel to Knoxville to take part in the work of the center,” said the center’s director, Richard Jantz. “It is exciting that the research we conduct is making direct contributions, not just to the work of law enforcement, but to science as a whole by building a picture of what makes a modern human a modern human.”