Crops of corpses isn’t what most of us expect to see at the farm but for forensic anthropologists such sights are simply another day at the office. Body farms, as such research facilities are known, are something of a spectator sport for scientists who hope to witness first-hand what happens as the human body decays. Studying decomposition has many applications across archaeology (like recreating this 8,000-year-old European mummy’s final resting position) and anthropology, but it’s also useful in improving forensic practices when identifying and determining the time of death of human remains. Sounds interesting? You ought to study taphonomy. What is taphonomy? Taphonomy is defined as the study of all the processes (such as burial, decay, and preservation) that affect animal and plant remains as they move from the biosphere as a living organism to the lithosphere as a fossil. There are currently nine human taphonomy research centers (AKA, body farms) in the world (seven in the US, one in Australia, and another in the Netherlands), but according to Science Focus, the UK might be about to get its first. Why do we need more human taphonomy research facilities? Having human taphonomy centers across the globe is actually crucial in our understanding of how bodies decay as the local environment shapes the process considerably. This means a person who has died out in the elements in Australia won’t decompose in the same way as a body in the wet and windy UK, so to see how it happens based on geographical location we need a wider range of research facilities. Limitations in human composition research in Europe have meant that much of researchers’ knowledge about decay in its climate and temperatures comes from case studies, anecdotal evidence, and what we have gleaned from doing animal studies. The UK already has several taphonomy centers based around animal remains such as pigs, but findings gleaned from these “analogs” for human bodies can only go so far. While pig studies are able to carry out large-scale experiments using lots of repeats for more generalizable results, the findings’ applications are limited in a court of law. This is because the remains won’t decay in the same way that a human, with all of our smoking and diabetes and various lifestyle-choice-led physiological quirks, will decay. Therefore, a human taphonomy lab in the region represents a big step for forensic scientists working in the local climate. Source
