[upbeat music]
It seems anthropology is everywhere these days,
and that's no coincidence [horn honks]
because anthropologists are everywhere these days.
[upbeat drumming]
Anthropology [dog barks] is the study of us.
Our clothes.
Our homes.
Our bodies.
How we talk and how we think.
Our past, present, and future.
It's all anthropology.
[music increases]
The American Anthropological Association has
created a video series to showcase how
anthropologists are tackling the world's most
pressing problems and making remarkable
contributions to human understanding.
[music fades out]
Death doesn't happen 9 to 5, Monday through
Friday.
It happens all the time.
A lot of the times, the phone will ring, and
I'm dead asleep.
They'll tell me, you know, "It's a 35-year-old
with a single gunshot wound to the head, and
there's a note on the seat, and so it's probably
a suicide."
I'm a death investigator and a forensic anthropologist.
Forensics is anything relating the law and
science together, so when we apply the law
to anthropology, that basically means we're
using our knowledge of human osteology and
kind of applying that to the law.
[car driving by]
The purpose of a medical examiner's office
is to determine cause and manner of death.
It's my job when I go out to the scene, and
when I'm asking questions on the phone to ---
of family members, doctors, law enforcement,
it's basically to rule out everything else,
and I do that with the specific questions
that I ask.
And this is where kind of the anthropology
training comes into play.
So I'm going to ask cops specific questions
and look for specific answers, whereas with
the families --- they just lost a loved one,
you know, so you have to kind of --- you have
to change your tone, you have to change the language that you're using when you're speaking to them
I've always wanted to do more of the forensic
science side then be a professor in anthropology
or work kind of in a traditional anthropology
role.
I was a researcher for the World War II Directorate
in that we went back and recreated the last-known
whereabouts and the circumstances of the loss
of folks from World War II service personnel.
At one of the very first Battle of the Bulge
fights, they took some shots from the German
soldiers, the boat went down, they couldn't
positively identify this gentlemen.
Uh, his name is Private Bayne.
So they buried him as an unknown, and there
he stayed for 60 years.
Being trained in forensic anthropology, I
went back in his records and was able to kind
of recreate everything, and they had made
a mistake.
His dental report said that he was missing
one of his molars, but the original --- when
he first entered the army, they had said that
he was missing a different molar.
Doing that identification with Bayne was kind
of just a touch and a taste of using what
I know to provide closure to a family, and
I knew that's what I wanted to do.
[background voices]
The good thing about an anthropology degree ---
it provides you with kind of this broad
overview of human beings.
People are scared of death.
In the United States, we are so reverent --- a
lot of the times, we ignore it.
And that's a very American thing to do, right?
Just ignore it, and it'll go away.
But everyone dies, and I think it's important
to find out why and what happened.
It's respectful to the person and to their
the family so they know.
I do this job because it's the worst day of
people's lives, and I can do it.
Somebody has to help these families and figure
out why their loved one is deceased.
I'm glad to do it, and it encompasses all
the things that I love to do.
[car driving away]
