Welcome, welcome everybody to the inaugural episode of the Bone Club.
I'm here with Stephanie Hartley and Jenna McCray,
and my name is Ashley Smith and we'll be your hosts as we journey through the
science that is true crime, CSI,
death investigation and the field of forensic anthropology.
The goal of this podcast is when we saw and when we look at
the media landscape that is today,
you have true crime podcasts that are very popular.
You have television shows such as CSI and some of the others
for our, you know, when we were coming up, it was Bones.
I never liked the show, but many in my cohorts did.
We also have crime novels that seem to be really popular
these days in conjunction with the spicy novels.
So we see all these different things that talk about death investigation,
that talk about, to an extent,
forensic anthropology, but there isn't much of a discussion as to what that science is.
So you'll read or you'll see or you'll hear on forensic files
that the shape of the skull indicated that the person was African-American.
What does that mean? How did we come up with it?
What's the science behind that?
That's the goal of this podcast.
And we also want to discuss the field of forensic anthropology
and what's going on in it.
How are things going? How do we do what we do?
And how does this field constantly change?
And to do that, we have three really good forensic anthropologists.
If we do say so ourselves.
My name is Ashley Smith.
I am a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.
I work mainly out of the University of Toronto Mississauga campus,
where I teach in the Department of Anthropology and in the Forensic Science Program.
My PhD is in forensic anthropology, essentially,
and I received my Masters of Science degree in 2012 from Boston University
also in forensic anthropology.
I'm about two and a half months from completing my PhD here
and getting ready to go on to the job market.
So things are a little bit up in the air.
I have throughout my career had an extensive record
when it comes to both research and cases.
So I've worked about 50 different cases over the last decade.
And I also do a lot of research and that research is widely varied.
Amongst some of the stuff that I've had published or is currently under review
are things on say, penitentive trauma, penetrative trauma
and its role in decomposition,
or how standardized are our osteometrics, how we measure bones.
Looking at the decay of bone proteins and its use as determining the time since death,
or how bone cells migrate and how you can use those to determine
if an injury occurred when someone died or just after someone died.
In my more recent publications and some of the stuff I've been working on now,
is looking at the field in general.
I worked with a collaborative group with about seven authors
looking at how we can incorporate the trans community into forensic anthropology
from a casework side, a teaching side, a research side of things.
And my current work that I'm working on with about a...
Hey, Siri.
Late night.
Well, we're going to edit that out.
Should have done that before.
That'll make it good.
It's funny.
Actually, I may do that.
So the stuff I'm currently working on now is trying to address the need for advocacy
in forensic anthropology.
We as forensic anthropologists tend to see the final end of a lot of marginalized individuals.
And yet our field has largely said we are objective, we don't discuss the policies,
we don't address the problems, but we have a unique privilege.
We need to start doing that.
And that leads me to why I came into this field in the first place.
Why am I a forensic anthropologist?
And I hope Stephanie and Jenna can discuss the same thing.
For me, I came into this field because as a trans person, way back in 2009 when I first
said I want to be that, I questioned what would happen to me and how would I be identified
if I was found in the woods?
And while I tried to get started on it in my masters, it didn't really pan out then.
It's something I'm starting to shift my focus towards now.
So I want to see how we can help to identify trans identified individuals and get them
off the rolls of the unidentified.
So that's a little bit about my background.
Stephanie, what about you?
Hi, yes, everyone.
I'm Stephanie Hartley.
I am a master's degree forensic anthropologist.
I currently work for SNA International supporting the DPA mission, which is pretty much a long
acronym, but it is Defense Prisoners of War Missing in Action Accounting Agency.
We predominantly look at past wars to try to identify the soldiers who went missing.
So if you think a plane goes down in Vietnam, someone has to go out and try to find it.
That's a lot of what that company does.
And I do primarily lab work.
So I work day in and day out looking at skeletal cases to try to create that biological profile
using things like DNA and isotopes and a bunch of other things to try to come together to
create what essentially is a bio profile or a picture of who that individual was before
they died or when they died and be able to try to accurately ID them.
I got my master's degree at the University of West Florida under Alicia Winburn.
So if you follow a lot of forensic anthropology stuff, I'm sure you've heard her name.
And I was in anthropology as a whole, but I focused on forensics.
And then I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.
And I had a dual major between criminal justice and anthropology.
And I dabbled in some chemistry, mainly because I thought I was going to do med school and
that didn't pan out as much as I thought it was going to.
I found my true love in anthropology and I hope you all can find it too.
My research primarily for grad school, instead of studying skeletal remains, which is what
a lot of people do for their research, I actually studied the people that did this research.
So I looked primarily at cognitive biases.
And so how Ashley was talking about how a lot of times scientific fields like to tout
how objective they are and things like that.
I really delved into that and tried to see are there cognitive biases that creep through
what is objective science.
Hint, hint, it is yes.
And so I primarily focused on that.
And then more recently since starting with the DPAA, I have really started to dabble
back into my chemistry side and have gone into isotope research to try to help with
decomingling, which is just a really fancy word to say you have a bunch of people and
bunch of parts of people and you have to try to figure out which one is person one, person
two, et cetera, try to segregate those remains into discrete people and doing that the isotopes.
I have a lot of random interests that I haven't quite done research in, more just like personal
exploration but not written research like a lot of academics do.
But I primarily do a lot of casework.
Pretty much it's all I do a day in and day out is casework.
And then I have dabbled in some cultural resource management.
So I dipped my toe into the archaeology side, being able to actually go out into the field
and do those types of excavations or digging to see if you can find remains or find anything
that would showcase that there was someone or something there at that time.
So any funerary objects or other things like that.
So yeah, that's pretty much me.
But I can toss it on over to Jenna.
All right.
Hello.
I am Jenna McCray, otherwise known as Jenna Mack.
I am actually completing my master's degree tomorrow.
So I will graduate tomorrow from the University of Toronto with an evolutionary anthropology
degree.
My research was also focused in forensic anthropology.
I mostly focused my efforts towards identifying gender on the skeleton.
So you may hear on bones or in all those various shows they say the shape of the eye orbit
says it's male.
I'm trying to look outside of that.
And to Ashley's point, I'm trying to see how we can identify how a person lived and
what their lived gender was.
So I was looking at evidence of wearing high heels using radiographs.
My undergraduate degree was actually at the University of Western Ontario.
And I was doing that in rehabilitation sciences.
So I've always really loved studying people and the way that people work.
And I just kind of switched on over to the way that people lived and then how I can see
that when they die.
I've always really loved helping people and I love the idea of bringing loved ones home
to their people.
I'm probably the babyest of the group here in terms of my expertise in forensic anthropology.
I have been on a handful of cases.
So real field work.
But I'm just working to figure out what my next stages are.
Sounds good.
Ashley works with me.
We're both in the exact same lab.
So I've tried to take her under my wing and tried to show her some things.
And she's done very well.
So actually that does bring me up to bring up a question.
And it's the purpose of this particular episode.
We've talked a lot about forensic anthropology, how we are forensic anthropologists, what we
do, how we do things.
But we didn't answer the question, what is forensic anthropology?
Now I know there's the Wikipedia answer.
We study someone's bones and try to find out their ancestry and their sex and their stature
and their height, what we call the bio profile.
We try to understand who that person is biologically and what happened to them.
But what is forensic anthropology really beyond the Wikipedia?
What do you think?
I like to think of forensic anthropology as the sciences closest connection to humanity
because depending on what school you go to, your anthropology degree might be a BS or
a bachelor of science or a BA, bachelor of arts.
And I think it really is both.
I think we are a perfect mixture of, yes, science.
We look at skeletal and biological remains to try to create that type of identification.
But we do so much more than just a bio profile, more than just a trauma assessment.
We really are that speaker for the individual who died and being able to tell the last moments
before they died and who they were as a person.
And you really get to know the humanity in that skeletal assemblage and in that person
and being able to showcase that to the world.
So I really enjoy forensic anthropology.
And that's what I always like to remind myself when I work casework, that it is not just
your Halloween plastic skeleton that you're looking at and thinking cool things, but really
this is someone's loved one and it really is your connection to that humanity and to
the cultures around you that is really important for forensic anthropology.
Yeah.
Broadly stated to me, anthropology generally is just the study of humans.
It's the study of where we came from, where we're going, what we've done, what we're
doing.
And forensic anthropology is the application of what we know about all of those things
and how all of them interact in a person's life and in a person's death and how we can
use that information to not only identify them, but to figure out how they lived and
how they died.
Yeah, see, I mean, for me, it's those things and something a little bit different.
It is the science of death.
It is the anthropology of death.
It is the one thing that unites all people, all cultures, all nations, not to get too
dark.
Everybody dies.
Quote, George Rube.
Everybody dies and our field studies death.
We are the science of death.
We are the anthropology of death.
We are the ones who see people at their most vulnerable state because nobody can, they
can't speak up for themselves anymore.
That's our job is to speak up for them, find out what happened to them.
But as Jenna said, what is their lived experience?
And I think that's what's changing in our field because our field for the longest time
was just that pure methodological, what do we have on the table?
And now when you start to see effectively what is our generation of anthropologists,
we're asking, no, what is the lived experience of that person?
What made that person the best way to help them?
What were you saying, Jenna?
Just like what made that person that person, you know?
Yeah.
What makes that person that person?
What makes them unique?
What makes them them?
And why is it we want to erase it in death?
We can't erase it in death.
So I think that is our ultimate goal.
Now we can't ignore some of the stuff that's that we've done in history, the bio profile
and things like that, but we do have to expand on what we do.
And that ultimately is forensic anthropology.
It's something that I'm trying to do and a lot of other people are trying to do.
We want to bring back the anthropology in forensic anthropology.
Right.
Bring back the human.
Forensics is just a descriptor.
We are anthropologists first.
And forensic anthropology because there's laws and legalities behind it, which is what
totes it as forensic.
But really we are anthropologists first and being able to put our little anthropology
hat on first is really important.
And then forensics is just that feather in the cap instead of the entire hat.
For lack of a better metaphor.
No, that's a great metaphor.
It is a great metaphor.
It brings me to the next thing.
It's just a thought in my head.
I recall when I first got started in a professional organization, it's called the American Academy
of Forensic Sciences.
It's one of the largest forensic science organizations in the world.
As a matter of fact, Stephanie and I are both members of that organization.
And when I got started in as a student affiliate in 2011, we were debating as a section to
drop the term physical anthropology and just go with anthropology.
That's our section name now is with the anthropology section.
The debate centered around, well, who can say they are in a member of this section?
Are we going to allow sociocultural anthropologists into forensic anthropology, into the anthropology
section?
And I have to ask, what's wrong with that?
What is wrong with collaborating with and partnering with the sociocultural side of
things?
And for an academic like myself, the people on the other end of the hall that are teaching
what I call squishy theory.
Why can't we get involved with them?
Why can't we discuss them?
Why can't we incorporate more theory in forensic anthropology?
The more multidisciplinary, the better.
It is a multi, well, anthropology is a multidisciplinary field.
It's a multidisciplinary science and social science.
And I think forensic anthropology has sort of gotten away from that.
And so we're trying to bring it back or we should try to bring it back.
I definitely think there are quite a few people in the field that are trying to, you know,
pull it back in and be like, remember, like all methods are based in theory.
And so just, you know, ignoring the fact that there's theory that is just entrenched in
everything we do is bad science.
Like, you know, you have to really keep your mind open to, well, not only what method am
I choosing to do my casework, but why am I choosing this method?
What is the theory behind this method?
Is that theory logical and sound?
And does it stand up to, you know, the standards that we set for ourselves in the field?
And all of those things are really important because they will shape your answer.
So your conclusion is really shaped by the world around you because people are shaped
by the world around you.
And so trying to ignore that theory really does yourself a disservice.
And then does the people you're serving your casework, because realistically, we are serving
our cases and, you know, trying to ID and things like that.
And if you try to ignore those things, you're also doing a disservice to your casework and
to those people that, you know, you're trying to give back to their loved ones.
And that's, that's who we deal with.
That's our whole mission is reuniting the deceased with their loved ones, whether that
is their biological family or their chosen family.
It is to put a name and a life to a set of remains, to a skeleton.
Right.
It's giving them answers.
There's a lot of times, you know, once it gets to the point that forensic anthropologists
are looking at our case, working at these remains, they've been dead for quite a while.
So the families might think they're still missing.
They might, you know, think, assume that they're, you know, dead, but have not found remains
to have no answers.
There's that ambiguous loss that is just perpetuating their lives that they don't have that answer.
And it's really hard to start a grieving process when you don't have an answer.
And so forensic anthropologists, part of our job is to try to give that answer.
And I know at least for myself with the work that I do, it's also sometimes explaining,
well, where was, you know, my grandpa or my great uncle or whoever was in the war, where
did they die?
What were they doing?
How did they die?
Because a lot of those things aren't known.
And so giving that type of answer is really a start to closure for a lot of people.
And what you do is actually very important, not just for the sort of individualistic trying
to deal with the families, but if you think about American culture, you and the work that
your colleagues do actually fulfills part of what I would call the American ethos, particularly
when it comes to our service people.
And that is we leave no one behind.
As a country, we try to leave no one behind.
And your mission is to leave no one behind.
No human gets left behind.
Yep.
No human gets left behind.
And that sort of, you can think about it by looking at, just look at CNN.
I mean, it feels like once a month, once every other month, there's a news story where your
outfit or the DPAA has identified somebody and brought them home to their families.
Now that's fulfilling sort of a national sort of a cultural aspect to it because it's fulfilling
that need that, hey, we have found another one.
We are not leaving them behind.
And I think it's also, I mean, it's very easy for a lot of people to connect to that as
far as military is concerned, because it is often a saying of no man left behind for military.
But I think all of forensic anthropology, I think a lot of us think that way of our
casework and the people that we are studying and trying to identify, we don't want to leave
them behind either.
And so I know the board certification for forensic anthropology has like Instagrams
and other things like that, that they often will showcase cold cases that hadn't been
able to be ID because science is always progressing and trying to get better.
And forensic anthropologists and new science has helped to identify someone who their case
has been cold for 20 years.
And so it's not just UPAA and it's not just military, but it really is no one left behind
for all of us.
And forensic anthropology is not just the US.
We have forensic anthropologists worldwide.
And I think a lot of us think that way of I'm not going to leave my casework behind
because this is someone's loved one.
This is someone's someone.
And you can't just ignore that.
And so having that, at least for myself, that's why I really gravitated more towards forensic
anthropology instead of going back to med school was because of that is you don't like
we are the study of death and you don't want like death isn't the end.
It might have been the end for someone's breathing, living life, but it's not the end of their
story.
It's not the end of their legacy on the world.
I feel like a lot of times for forensic anthropology, being able to make those identifications and
tell their story, it's sharing their legacy and furthering themselves.
And so they don't end.
Some of the work we do as well is just recovering individuals.
If you think of a house fire, when somebody perishes in a house fire, somebody may want
to come home to that house and one of the important jobs that we have is making sure
that we recover all of that individual's remains so that they can be laid to rest however the
family wants to lead them to rest.
And just ensuring that not only does no human get left behind, but no, to the best of our
abilities, no part of that human will be left behind.
Yeah.
I mean, and here in Ontario, we deal with indigenous remains from time to time.
What we call here in Canada, First Nations.
And that is a very big part of the various different nations' culture is even the tiniest
little finger bone is person and you don't leave it behind.
And you're right Stephanie, it permeates not just at the DPAA, it permeates all throughout.
I am a consultant with a nonprofit organization called Please Bring Me Home.
The whole purpose of the organization is to sort of investigate and search for cold case
missing persons.
And my job is to go through whatever they find and to see, yeah, we may have someone
here and trying to help those investigators figure out where they should search and where
they shouldn't search.
And it's a fantastic organization.
It is a fantastic organization.
If you're in Canada, you should really look them up.
It's called Please Bring Me Home.
You can volunteer with them.
You can volunteer with them, surely.
All right.
Does anybody have anything they want to add?
I say, I guess just to try to liven things up a bit because while we are the study of
death and sometimes that can get depressing and dark, right?
Sometimes it can be really, really cool and fascinating and obviously a little morbid.
So if you have a morbid sense of humor, you probably will love it here.
But you also, as forensic anthropologists, every case is different because every person
is different.
And so you get to see so many cool things about the human body that you might not have
known where like, you know, you could have studied.
I mean, I went through a lot of school.
They went through a lot of school.
And still, I feel like every time I, you know, open a new case, I learned something new about
the human body, which is always really fascinating.
Just seeing all the different intricacies of people and how even, you know, at least
for the cases that I work on, it's a pretty homogeneous group because if you think World
War II, it's a lot of 18 to 25 year old white guys, right?
But even in that really homogeneous group, you see so much variability in the human skeleton,
which is super fascinating.
And so I know I really enjoy being able to see that.
And then also, let's be real, if you tuned in to a podcast called the Bone Club, you
probably really like CSI, you like crime shows, you see a lot of trauma, and not just like,
oh, the trauma that caused the person's death, but like trauma that happened beforehand.
So like, I've seen cases where there's massive blunt force trauma to the head.
So essentially got hit with something big and hard enough to for it to have affected,
you know, your cranium, and they live to tell the tale, right?
It healed over and everything's fine.
And you know, they kept on living.
And that really just shows the resiliency of mankind as well, because, you know, you
can go through so much and still live to tell the tale.
And then while obviously everyone dies, and that's how you ended up on our tables.
But now we get to tell your tales.
And that's also a really important, fascinating thing for me, at least.
Well, as a person I was talking to last week was saying, we are very special people because
we're not accountants.
It's not the same job day in and day out.
Every day is a new thing.
Every day is a new adventure.
Every case is unique.
Every scene is unique.
So if you're somebody who wants structure, but at the same time doesn't want the same
thing over and over and over and over again, consider forensic anthropology.
Plus, we're some pretty cool people.
Trust us, we are some pretty cool people.
You also get to do some pretty wild and epic things sometimes where, you know, you might
get called out for a recovery and have to climb a mountainside.
I've never climbed a mountainside, so you get to learn a new skill or, you know, just
this morning I was digging a hole in the middle of somewhere else.
So it's like, you never really know what the job is going to make you do.
So you always kind of have to be on your toes a little bit, which is really fun.
So then you get to see so much and also interact with the world around you in just ways that
you probably wouldn't have, you know, being an accountant or being, you know, other different
types of jobs.
I know I've been volunteering.
So I live on Oahu.
I've been volunteering with some organizations in a city not too far from where I'm currently
at and trying to find Iwi Kapuna, which is essentially ancestors, and trying to be able
to repatriate and rebury them in a proper way and being able to work with the cultures
around you and like being able to learn so much more that I probably would never have
learned in a random other day job, right?
You don't get yourself in those weird sticky situations as an accountant or even when I
wanted to do med school, even as a doctor, you probably won't get yourself in those types
of situations and you really get to learn so much about the world around you, which
then helps you learn about yourself a little bit as well, because being able to see that
variability and seeing the culture differences really just shows you not only how similar
everyone is to each other, but how different everyone is and how beautiful that can be,
at least for myself.
Yeah.
And then you also have the slight element of danger.
Going to work at a fire scene from a house that is less than secure and it's minus 25
degrees Celsius, we're getting below zero Fahrenheit.
It's fun.
Feel toes free.
It's fun.
So I might leave those for you.
I'm not a fan of the cold.
That's why you're in Hawaii.
I think the funniest thing about this field too is like one of the things that I would
like to say is dead people don't talk back, but I've never learned so much about, like
I did an undergrad and a degree in alive people and I've never learned so much about people
as I have in studying them in depth.
And I feel like that's just the craziest thing about this.
And at the end of the day, no matter who you are or what you do or where you came from,
everybody is just bones.
At the end of it, we're all just the same.
We're skin sacks and bones.
And it's humbling to realize that we're all very unique and also so very much the same.
Agreed.
There are other squishy bits in there too, besides skin sacks.
Yeah, the occasional squishy part.
The squishy bits are not the stuff I like either.
They're not the Halloween decorations.
I'll stay away from my fleshy bits.
So I will take fleshy bits over hair and nails.
That's never been the thing that I love.
I actually, I love the fleshy bits.
One of the things I have gotten into, it was my undergrad, my master's program was actually
in a department of anatomy.
So we had to do a lot of the gross anatomy stuff.
I've been a teaching assistant and I actually started out as the course instruct, one of
the course instructors for our forensic anatomy course here.
And I love anatomy.
I love soft tissue anatomy.
It's absolutely fascinating.
But I'll say the bones are best.
I'm fascinated.
I have a stank face the entire time I do autopsies.
Yep.
But I'm like, oh, this is so cool.
This is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
No, no, I find them fascinating.
It's just watching an autopsy on somebody who is rather decomposed where you want to
go.
I'll stand on the other side of the air conditioning.
I would say I'll take the smell of decomp over the smell of burned remains because let's
be real, it just smells like fried chicken.
And that just feels weird.
No, not fried chicken.
Barbecue.
Good job.
It's so glamorous, isn't it?
You know you are good for this field when you can come back from a fire scene and say,
I'm hungry.
Or when you can be on a fire scene and eat a meat lover's pizza.
No problem.
Yeah.
Didn't you do that?
Yeah.
I felt very dark, but I enjoyed it.
It's a really good pizza.
You do have to have a slightly dark sense of humor.
Yes, you do.
When you deal with death all day long, obviously there are some traumas that go along with
it.
And for a lot of us, trauma response, humor.
Yeah.
I mean, if you don't find a way, and we'll actually probably discuss and have an episode
where we talk about these traumas.
But yeah, if you don't have a way to deal with it, you are destined for the grippy socks
factory.
Hard to stay out either way.
So I think we've just about covered what forensic anthropology is.
I want to thank you all for listening to us today.
Our next episode will be in about a month from now, and it'll be on job prospects in
forensic anthropology.
It's something that I've come to appreciate greatly as I'm coming to my end.
Jenna is right at her end, and she's debating whether or not to go into the field or go
into academia as a PhD student.
And Stephanie went right into the field.
Oh yeah.
Went straight to work.
Straight to work.
So we're going to discuss next time the various different job prospects.
How do you actually get into this field?
What are some things that you can do?
And we're going to do it from a more realistic perspective.
This isn't necessarily going to be a rah rah selling point, but something you should consider
if you're seriously considering this field.
So again, I want to thank you all.
If you want to reach us, we do have some ways for you to reach us.
We have an email account, which is boneclubpodcast at gmail.com.
That's boneclubpodcast at gmail.com.
And we're also on Instagram and threads as at the bone club podcast.
That's at the bone club podcast.
Yep.
So if you weren't scared away by the fleshy bits talk or the burned remains talks or the
whatever else we decided to throw at you today, I mean, join the bone club.
Join the bone club.
Join us.
All right.
So for myself, Stephanie and Jenna, we want to thank you and we'll see you next month.
See you next time.