The other side of life
A leading anatomist and forensic anthropologist, Professor Dame Sue Black is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University. She was the lead forensic anthropologist for the UK response to war crimes investigations in Kosovo and has also served in Sierra Leone, Grenada, Iraq, and in Thailand following the Asian tsunami. Black has been awarded two police commendations for her work in disaster victim identification training and also for helping to secure convictions against perpetrators of child sexual abuse. She was awarded an OBE in 2001 and a DBE in 2016 for her services to education and forensic anthropology. Black is a Fellow and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Biology, and the lifetime professor of anatomy for the Royal Scottish Academy. She is the author of 14 textbooks, more than 150 peer reviewed publications, and the best-selling book about death, All That Remains.
Zan Boag: To begin, I wonder if you could describe exactly what it is that you do as a forensic anthropologist, and how it differs from the work of a forensic pathologist?
: Fundamentally our job, more than anything, is about identification: who was the deceased in life? For a pathologist, their prime role is about determining what is the manner of death and what is the cause of death, so they’re looking at something very specific like a stabbing – the manner of death was a stabbing, but the cause of death was because the blade went through the heart and you had massive loss of blood. Our job is not to do that. Our job is to say who this person was when they were alive, because one of the most difficult things for a police force is if you have a body and the name of that person is not known. So how do you start to track who they might be, who last saw them, who are the family, who are the friends, who are the work colleagues? Most of us, when we die, we’re going to die in an environment where people know who we are – whether that’s in our homes, our cars, or a hospital, whatever it may be. But when a body is found unexpectedly, getting to the name of the individual is the most important thing to allow the investigation to start, and that’s where we tend to become involved. Not necessarily when the body is very fresh, because if you’re recently deceased we’ll look for DNA sampling, we’ll look for fingerprints, and that may help us. But as a body starts to decompose, as a body gets as far as being skeletonised, or the body is caught up in a fire or an explosion so that it’s in fragments, you can see that doing the jigsaw that brings the human person back together again and then allows you to establish who they were – that’s when we really come into our fore.
