In Texas, the Bodies of Migrants Who Perished in the Desert Provide Clues to the Living
THE UNCLAIMED DEAD
Ryan Devereaux, Robert Shults
July 1 2017, 7:33 a.m.
The bodies are typically found by accident. A decaying corpse drying out in the Texas sun, stumbled upon by a hunter or ranch hand. A call might be placed to the sheriff’s office or the remains might be loaded into the back of a pickup truck. Often, they will be delivered to a rural cemetery where paperwork may or may not be filled out before they are lowered into a hole in some unclaimed corner of the graveyard. Sometimes, a tin marker bearing words such as “unidentified male” or “unidentified female” will be left to signal the deceased’s final resting place, but often not. And so it has been for years in Brooks County, an expanse of sprawling ranches some 75 m iles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, where more than 550 dead migrants have been found since 2009, marking the highest total for any county in the state.
Robert Shults, a photographer based in Austin, Texas, did not set out to document his state’s crisis of unclaimed dead, at least not directly. Shults’s professional area of interest is science and scientists at work; it’s what first brought him to the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State in the winter of 2015 and kept him coming back in the year that followed. Shults’s idea was to assume the role of a “participant observer,” visiting with graduate students each day, sitting in on their classes, accompanying them as they gathered donations for their program, and watching as they learned to untangle complex forensics cases, all the while snapping photos.
The star of Texas State’s forensic anthropology program, where Shults spent much of his year, is a 26-acre outdoor laboratory that allows students to study donated human bodies in various stages of decomposition. Only a handful of such facilities exist in the world and the lab here is the largest. Officially known as the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, it is sometimes referred to simply as the “body farm.” Predictably, the decomposition lab, with its ready-made imagery, has received extensive coverage in the press since its 2008 opening. “It’s the thing that gets most of the attention,” Shults told The Intercept. Unfortunately, he added, those accounts have often rung hollow. “One of the things that gets missed is the mission, is the reason why,” Shults said. “Why does this university take donors’ bodies, set them outside, and watch them decompose?”
Camera in hand, Shults set out to examine those questions, ultimately finding the answers he was searching for in another component of the university’s forensic anthropology program, an initiative known as Operation Identification. The program began in 2013 amid a swirl of grassroots organizing and the exhumation of more than 50 unidentified human remains from a rural graveyard named Sacred Heart. Discovered by a team of student researchers and anthropologists from Baylor University and the University of Indianapolis, many of the bodies pulled from the ground at Sacred Heart had been buried together, five at a time. Some were found in coffins, others were not. One migrant’s remains were buried in a milk crate.
More:
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/01/in-texas-the-bodies-of-migrants-who-perished-in-the-desert-provide-clues-to-the-living/
