Suspect graveyard burial (South Armagh, N. Ireland): Combined search, forensic anthropology and radiocarbon dating.

Autor: O'Reilly RA; School of the Natural, Built Environment, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1NN, United Kingdom. Electronic address: roreilly05@qub.ac.uk., Ruffell A; School of the Natural, Built Environment, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1NN, United Kingdom., Reimer PJ; School of the Natural, Built Environment, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1NN, United Kingdom.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Science & justice : journal of the Forensic Science Society [Sci Justice] 2023 Jan; Vol. 63 (1), pp. 1-8. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Oct 22.
DOI: 10.1016/j.scijus.2022.10.002
Abstrakt: Geophysical investigation of a former convent graveyard for conversion to a community centre identified an unrecorded, unmarked burial below a later burial. Archaeological excavation confirmed the presence of skeletonized human remains, considered by police as a possible clandestine burial. Mortuary examination indicated the remains belonged to a mature adult female. To determine whether the deceased could be a recorded missing person, radiocarbon dating was undertaken on a femur and a rib bone. This is not always straightforward, and results showed two possible ages due to intercepts on either side of the nuclear weapons testing spike in atmospheric 14 C; however, the later dated burial allowed us to constrain the date of a rib to CE 1959. This study demonstrates that dating a second tissue with a longer turnaround time, such as a femur, can help to constrain which side of the bomb spike is most probable. This paper documents in one work the search, scene and sample and then advances this to resolution by anthropological analysis and radiocarbon dating of human remains.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
Externí odkaz: