Dateline: Bogotá, Colombia

Pellissippi State instructor on sabbatical training forensic anthropologists

Identifying bodies can be a tricky business: how do you determine age, gender and ancestry from a skeleton?

The answer lies in the bones, says Pellissippi State faculty member Elizabeth DiGangi.

DiGangi knows. She is on a yearlong sabbatical in Bogotá, Colombia, where so many remains have been discovered that the government has called in extra help. She is working for the U.S. Department of Justice in the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program.

The anthropology instructor, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Buffalo (New York), has worked at Pellissippi State for two and a half years. She interviewed in December 2007 to take part in the Colombia project.

“My job essentially is to teach, develop curriculum and train,” she said, “also to consult at the different labs with the anthropologists. I just finished teaching a course on identifying trauma. That was here at the national morgue in Bogotá.”

Between warring paramilitary groups and terrorist organizations, the murder rate in South America is astounding, says DiGangi. According to recent reports, more than 1,500 bodies have been recovered. DNA testing was used to identify 400 of them.

Authorities believe more than 10,000 bodies might still be scattered across the continent. Many times victims’ bodies have been discovered in mass graves, and forensic labs are running behind in notifying families.

“In Colombia they have a big problem with disappearing people,” the 31-year-old DiGangi said, adding that despite the country’s reputation as a drug exporter, most of the killing isn’t drug but politically motivated.

“Some of the people who were killed simply got in the way of a paramilitary or terrorist group. Some may have been members of one of the terrorist groups and weren’t doing what they were supposed to. The labs have an influx of bodies. They have to go out and excavate these remains and then analyze them in the hope of a positive identification.”

The training DiGangi provides forensic professionals in Bogotá is twofold: to correctly exhume the bodies and to read the clues that will help them identify the remains. And she’s perfectly suited to the work.

“If I see something about a bone that’s really different, I get excited and think, ‘What is that person’s story?’ Everybody has a story. Everybody has a family, friends, a job, secrets. They’ve done good things and bad things. When they’re not there anymore, we have their bones. We can tell a lot about a person from their bones—age, diseases, trauma, sex, height, age at death and ancestry.”

For example, says DiGangi, nodules on the spine indicate arthritis, and that usually means the person was over 30. Wider pelvic bones are a clue that the deceased is female. Facial bones often reveal the remains’ ancestry.

“Traits in the bones, especially in the face, can help you determine that someone descended from a particular population,” said DiGangi. “The problem with ancestry determination is gene flow—people mating with people of other populations, especially in today’s world, and therefore the traits can be mixed.”

Because of governmental restrictions, DiGangi says she hasn’t been involved in exhuming graves, many of which are located in the jungle.

“My job is not to physically do it for them; it’s to advise them about how to do it more efficiently.

“One of the most important courses I do is the archaeology field course. In it, we teach the participants how to do an excavation properly. If a person was thrown in a grave and they were shot, there might be a bunch of bullets. If you use a shovel to dig, you lose the spatial relation of the bullets to the body.”

As much as DiGangi is enjoying the work she’s doing in Bogotá, she’s also encountered a few frustrations along the way—chief among them that she has no car and doesn’t speak the language fluently. She uses an interpreter while she’s teaching, and a translator helps her prepare material.

“My secretary doesn’t speak English. Dealing with the language barrier is certainly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

DiGangi returns to the U.S. next month and says she hopes to add forensic anthropology to the list of classes she teaches at Pellissippi State.

Meanwhile, she is one of four contributors to “A New Method for Estimating Age-at-Death from the First Rib,“ which was published in the “American Journal of Physical Anthropology” August 2008. Jonathan Bethard, also on the Pellissippi State faculty, is another of the contributors.

“I think it is a very important article for our field,” said DiGangi.