Body farms

Excerpt

While it has been argued that there is a near consensus on horror in the West related to the decay of the body [1], there is equally a voyeuristic fascination associated with the dead. This attraction is well demonstrated by the proposal to broadcast the decomposition of a human body in a Channel 4 documentary [2], and the popularity of crime fiction novels such as “The Body Farm” [3]. Some ten years after the forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass developed the first human taphonomic facility at the University of Tennessee in 1981, the crime fiction novelist Patricia Cornwell visited the facility and subsequently wrote “The Body Farm” [3]. Bass’s reason for developing The Anthropological Research Facility (ARF) was to attempt to understand the differences in body preservation he observed in forensic cases in Tennessee compared to those in Kansas where he had previously worked [4]. However, the term “taphonomy” did not appear in the forensic literature until the late 1980s [5]. Bass noted that “….her [Cornwell’s] book catapulted us to fame, the Body Farm has been featured in numerous television documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles, radio reports, and,…., a bestselling crime-fiction series, The Body Farm Novels” [4]. …