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Bill Bass

Emeritus Professor of Forensic Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Around half of all forensic anthropologists working in the US today have studied with Bill Bass, who, in the early 1970s, set up the Anthropological Research Facility – better known as the Body Farm – on waste ground at the University of Tennessee, at Knoxville. Bass, who started his career excavating burial sites and cataloguing the bones of Native Americans for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, discovered from experience that one of the hardest things to get right is the length of time a body has been dead. Working later as a consultant for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, he became convinced there was a need to study, in a methodical, scientific way, exactly what happens to bodies as they decompose. But it was the case in which his judgement of the time of death was a full 112 years out that galvanised him finally to set up the Body Farm, where corpses are left to rot under different conditions, and all manner of studies are undertaken by scientists.

When I went to speak to him in autumn 2007, he drove me straight from the airport to the site on a hillside overlooking the Tennessee River.

Let me give you just about a three-minute history. I taught forensic anthropology for 11 years, from 1960, at the University of Kansas. I also identified skeletal material for law enforcement agencies in Kansas, but I don’t ever remember getting a maggot-covered body – they were all skeletal remains. I came here to Knoxville 1 June 1971 to take over a three-person department that was an undergraduate-only programme and to build it into a graduate programme. The medical examiner in Tennessee knew me and asked if I would serve as a forensic anthropologist for the medical examiner system, and I said, ‘Yes.’

It wasn’t long before bodies started coming in. Now, the police don’t ask you, ‘Who is that?’ They ask you, ‘How long have they been there?’ I think the reason is that in a criminal justice system they’re trained that the sooner you get on the chase the more likely you are to solve a crime.

The major characters in body decomposition are the maggots – I mean, the flies are the first ones to get there, and they do the greatest reduction of a body. Well, I didn’t know anything about maggots, so I looked in the literature and there was very little in there. I won’t say there was nothing, but there wasn’t much dealing with length of time since death. So I decided, ‘You know, if I’m talking to the police about how long somebody’s been dead, I better know something about it.’ So I went to the dean, and asked if I could have some land to put dead bodies on.

I started up with the sow barn at the Holston Farm, which is about 12 miles up the river from where we are right now. We used that from 1971 until 1980. Now business was really expanding, so I asked for more land. Where we are right now was where the university used to burn its trash, and sometime in the 1960s the Environmental Protection Agency said, ‘You can’t have open burning.’ So they covered this over with dirt and it just grew up with bushes. And I reckon they figured, ‘It’s been a dump for all these years, might as well go give it to Dr Bass for his dead bodies!’ There are somewhere between two and three acres right here.

This is way over-used, by the way: there are about 150 bodies out here right now. And we don’t have any sterile land, if you want to call it that, for a student wanting to do research – there have been bodies put almost anywhere you can put a body. So we went back to the university and got some additional land.