Science & Math
Biological Sciences
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Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains
An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice.
"Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration-of building something new with the ‘pile of broken mirrors' that is memory, loss, and mourning."
Throughout Guatemala's thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed more than two hundred thousand people. Argentina's military dictatorship disappeared up to thirty thousand people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights.
In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds-hands bound by rope, machete cuts-and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost.
Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual-a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.
Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.
"Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration-of building something new with the ‘pile of broken mirrors' that is memory, loss, and mourning."
Throughout Guatemala's thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed more than two hundred thousand people. Argentina's military dictatorship disappeared up to thirty thousand people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights.
In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds-hands bound by rope, machete cuts-and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost.
Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual-a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.
Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.
Editorial Reviews
Chapter 1
A Lovely Grave for Learning
It is September, and I am standing on a hill in El Quiché, Guatemala, with a pickax in my hand. For the past month, I have been working alongside forensic anthropologists who are recovering the bodies of the victims of one of Latin America's longest, bloodiest armed conflicts. We dig trenches, roughly eight feet long and six feet deep-about the size of a coffin. It is backward grave digging, pulling bodies out of the ground, not putting them in. Plunging the pickax, I imagine hitting a body, and the idea makes me cringe and gives me a visceral reaction of horror. I break my swing and let the pickax land softly on the dirt when I think of this. Before coming here, I had read anthropologist Victoria Sanford's Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, an account of her fieldwork in the mid-1990s documenting the aftermath of La Violencia, as the conflict is locally known. At Sanford's first encounter with a mass grave, she repeated to herself: "Don't faint. Don't vomit." I adopt this as my prayer, too. Let us find the bodies, but let me not hit anything-anyone-with a shovel.
Everything begins to look like a body. The white roots of plants and sticks look like bones. Rotted leaves look like fabric; our footprints dried in the mud look like the rubber soles of shoes. Underground, deep down, we find tunnels from moles, colonies of black-winged insects, thick white grubs, and ants. Everything seems like potent proof. And they could be clues. Dead bodies attract these subterranean creatures. There are cycles of life associated with decay. Even after thirty years, when flesh has decomposed, there are still trace nutrients. Like schools of fish in a shipwreck, things take up residence in the armature of bones. As I dig, I think of the lines from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Thousands of men, women, and children are buried in Guatemalan earth, lives violently made into bones, hidden in this strange underground world.
As we dig, forensi...
A Lovely Grave for Learning
It is September, and I am standing on a hill in El Quiché, Guatemala, with a pickax in my hand. For the past month, I have been working alongside forensic anthropologists who are recovering the bodies of the victims of one of Latin America's longest, bloodiest armed conflicts. We dig trenches, roughly eight feet long and six feet deep-about the size of a coffin. It is backward grave digging, pulling bodies out of the ground, not putting them in. Plunging the pickax, I imagine hitting a body, and the idea makes me cringe and gives me a visceral reaction of horror. I break my swing and let the pickax land softly on the dirt when I think of this. Before coming here, I had read anthropologist Victoria Sanford's Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, an account of her fieldwork in the mid-1990s documenting the aftermath of La Violencia, as the conflict is locally known. At Sanford's first encounter with a mass grave, she repeated to herself: "Don't faint. Don't vomit." I adopt this as my prayer, too. Let us find the bodies, but let me not hit anything-anyone-with a shovel.
Everything begins to look like a body. The white roots of plants and sticks look like bones. Rotted leaves look like fabric; our footprints dried in the mud look like the rubber soles of shoes. Underground, deep down, we find tunnels from moles, colonies of black-winged insects, thick white grubs, and ants. Everything seems like potent proof. And they could be clues. Dead bodies attract these subterranean creatures. There are cycles of life associated with decay. Even after thirty years, when flesh has decomposed, there are still trace nutrients. Like schools of fish in a shipwreck, things take up residence in the armature of bones. As I dig, I think of the lines from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Thousands of men, women, and children are buried in Guatemalan earth, lives violently made into bones, hidden in this strange underground world.
As we dig, forensi...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
A Lovely Grave for Learning
It is September, and I am standing on a hill in El Quiché, Guatemala, with a pickax in my hand. For the past month, I have been working alongside forensic anthropologists who are recovering the bodies of the victims of one of Latin America's longest, bloodiest armed conflicts. We dig trenches, roughly eight feet long and six feet deep-about the size of a coffin. It is backward grave digging, pulling bodies out of the ground, not putting them in. Plunging the pickax, I imagine hitting a body, and the idea makes me cringe and gives me a visceral reaction of horror. I break my swing and let the pickax land softly on the dirt when I think of this. Before coming here, I had read anthropologist Victoria Sanford's Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, an account of her fieldwork in the mid-1990s documenting the aftermath of La Violencia, as the conflict is locally known. At Sanford's first encounter with a mass grave, she repeated to herself: "Don't faint. Don't vomit." I adopt this as my prayer, too. Let us find the bodies, but let me not hit anything-anyone-with a shovel.
Everything begins to look like a body. The white roots of plants and sticks look like bones. Rotted leaves look like fabric; our footprints dried in the mud look like the rubber soles of shoes. Underground, deep down, we find tunnels from moles, colonies of black-winged insects, thick white grubs, and ants. Everything seems like potent proof. And they could be clues. Dead bodies attract these subterranean creatures. There are cycles of life associated with decay. Even after thirty years, when flesh has decomposed, there are still trace nutrients. Like schools of fish in a shipwreck, things take up residence in the armature of bones. As I dig, I think of the lines from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Thousands of men, women, and children are buried in Guatemalan earth, lives violently made into bones, hidden in this strange underground world.
As we dig, forensic team members examine the soil: reddish loam and friable clay. They are looking for evidence that the layers are revuelto, mixed. If the soil has been disturbed, it shows that the area has been previously dug up-potentially a sign of buried bodies. Blended strata mark the earth like a scar. Shoveling is repetitive work, physically exhausting, but not boring. It is electrified by the promise of finding the bodies. But after hours, we still find nothing.
A few times a day, someone unearths pottery shards. We gather around to look at them. One day a farmer brings us a ceramic figure he found while tilling his maize field. The clay head is about the size of a quarter, and the face bears a serious, concerned expression. It looks like something you would see in a museum. It almost certainly should be in a museum. The farmer wants to sell it for 100 USD, but buying it would be illegal. A photographer visiting the site pays him 5 USD to take a picture of it. This haunting little face has been unearthed after being buried perhaps hundreds of years in the sorrowful dirt of Guatemala, where the bones of a decades-old genocide are stacked on top of the bones of five hundred years of colonial conquest. Excavation reveals history as a material presence, the earth as a calendar. We cut through the matted sod of the present, digging through stratified years. Another day, we find part of a clay vessel, its graceful rim nearly intact. Esteban is one of several team members who are classically trained archaeologists and have worked at sites like Tikal and Cotzumalhuapa. He says it is prehispánico, dating it to before the Spanish invaded, greedy for gold, sugar, and slaves. Before what Maya accounts call the arrival of the "force of great suffering" and the beginning of "misery and affliction." Esteban throws the fragment back into the pit, like catch-and-release fishing. It is illegal to take any of the shards. Anyway, they aren't what we are here for.
A Lovely Grave for Learning
It is September, and I am standing on a hill in El Quiché, Guatemala, with a pickax in my hand. For the past month, I have been working alongside forensic anthropologists who are recovering the bodies of the victims of one of Latin America's longest, bloodiest armed conflicts. We dig trenches, roughly eight feet long and six feet deep-about the size of a coffin. It is backward grave digging, pulling bodies out of the ground, not putting them in. Plunging the pickax, I imagine hitting a body, and the idea makes me cringe and gives me a visceral reaction of horror. I break my swing and let the pickax land softly on the dirt when I think of this. Before coming here, I had read anthropologist Victoria Sanford's Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, an account of her fieldwork in the mid-1990s documenting the aftermath of La Violencia, as the conflict is locally known. At Sanford's first encounter with a mass grave, she repeated to herself: "Don't faint. Don't vomit." I adopt this as my prayer, too. Let us find the bodies, but let me not hit anything-anyone-with a shovel.
Everything begins to look like a body. The white roots of plants and sticks look like bones. Rotted leaves look like fabric; our footprints dried in the mud look like the rubber soles of shoes. Underground, deep down, we find tunnels from moles, colonies of black-winged insects, thick white grubs, and ants. Everything seems like potent proof. And they could be clues. Dead bodies attract these subterranean creatures. There are cycles of life associated with decay. Even after thirty years, when flesh has decomposed, there are still trace nutrients. Like schools of fish in a shipwreck, things take up residence in the armature of bones. As I dig, I think of the lines from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Thousands of men, women, and children are buried in Guatemalan earth, lives violently made into bones, hidden in this strange underground world.
As we dig, forensic team members examine the soil: reddish loam and friable clay. They are looking for evidence that the layers are revuelto, mixed. If the soil has been disturbed, it shows that the area has been previously dug up-potentially a sign of buried bodies. Blended strata mark the earth like a scar. Shoveling is repetitive work, physically exhausting, but not boring. It is electrified by the promise of finding the bodies. But after hours, we still find nothing.
A few times a day, someone unearths pottery shards. We gather around to look at them. One day a farmer brings us a ceramic figure he found while tilling his maize field. The clay head is about the size of a quarter, and the face bears a serious, concerned expression. It looks like something you would see in a museum. It almost certainly should be in a museum. The farmer wants to sell it for 100 USD, but buying it would be illegal. A photographer visiting the site pays him 5 USD to take a picture of it. This haunting little face has been unearthed after being buried perhaps hundreds of years in the sorrowful dirt of Guatemala, where the bones of a decades-old genocide are stacked on top of the bones of five hundred years of colonial conquest. Excavation reveals history as a material presence, the earth as a calendar. We cut through the matted sod of the present, digging through stratified years. Another day, we find part of a clay vessel, its graceful rim nearly intact. Esteban is one of several team members who are classically trained archaeologists and have worked at sites like Tikal and Cotzumalhuapa. He says it is prehispánico, dating it to before the Spanish invaded, greedy for gold, sugar, and slaves. Before what Maya accounts call the arrival of the "force of great suffering" and the beginning of "misery and affliction." Esteban throws the fragment back into the pit, like catch-and-release fishing. It is illegal to take any of the shards. Anyway, they aren't what we are here for.
