Grave Methods

Our work starts in the field at the grave, and we have to first find the graves. We have various ways of doing that, but then once we begin our exhumation, we have to use the same very painstaking, meticulous techniques that archaeologists have always used to recover prehistoric remains, because a human skeleton consists of over 200 bones and a number of teeth, and each one of those can tell us something about the life history of that individual in terms of identification and the cause of death. So they all have to be recovered, along with bullets, clothing that might help us get the person identified, personal effects, and things of that sort. And the fieldwork is very tedious, very, very hard. No matter which country we work in, it has to be part of the judicial process. We can't just go out and start digging up skeletons. Right from the first in Argentina, when we were doing these exhumations, we were doing them under a judge's order. And when we started out, of course, we had always had a police presence. And that was, particularly for the students, rather nerve-wracking, in the early days, because in Argentina, the police functioned as a fourth arm of the military and were responsible for many of the disappearances and deaths.