Forensic anthropologist and Smithsonian scientist Doug Owsley has been involved in cases ranging from Waco, Texas to Croatia. Recently, Owsley spoke with FRONTIERS about his work, his curiosity, and his love of learning.
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How did you become a physical anthropologist?

I grew up in a small town in Wyoming so many years ago that television was not as it is today and there were not programs like those on PBS, programs that focused on history and science. What I turned out to be- a physical anthropologist or more specifically a forensic anthropologist- you never even heard those words when I was a kid. I went to the University of Wyoming where I got my bachelors of Science in zoology and I was planning to go into either medicine or dentistry.

My influence was a very special professor, Dr. George Gill at the University of Wyoming who encouraged me to go out into the field. He allowed me, as well as other promising students, to get involved in some of his class work and then into the fieldwork. I traveled with him down in Mexico on a field project, and for somebody who's coming out of Wyoming and doesn't have a lot of experience in other parts of the world, that was quite exciting. He introduced me to Bill Bass at the University of Tennessee and I went to study under Dr. Bass. I still work with George Gill on different projects and we are good friends.

What notable cases have you worked on?

I worked on graves in Croatia, the mass graves from the 1991-95 war. I assisted the Terrent (Waco, TX) County Medical Examiner with the identifications of Branch Davidians and I worked in Guatemala on the identifications of American journalists that disappeared there. I've worked on thousands of human skeletons.

	Teeth can reveal details about a person's age, diet and socio-economic status.

I do forensic work for law enforcement agencies as a public service. My primary objective is to assist in the identification of remains. I'm also trained as an archaeologist, so I bring archaeological field techniques to these kinds of cases so we can interpret what happened at the site.

In the laboratory, I examine the remains to determine the person's age, their sex, their ancestry, how tall they are, information about health conditions they might have had, and previous injuries- focusing, extensively on what happened to that person. We establish general criteria that we then report to the law enforcement agency. They go to their missing persons files, and there may be one or two matches. We get records on those missing individuals and we match up many different features. The files might contain a physical description, photographs, or x-rays.

	Owsley shows Alan Alda the bullet-shattered leg bone of a Jamestown resident.

We work very cautiously. We don't want the guy to come home from a fishing trip in Alaska six months later. We approach it very seriously and objectively. We then try to shed light on what types of injuries there were. We look over every square inch of that skeleton for anything that's abnormal.


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