Paul Revere inadvertently became America’s first forensic dentist when he was given the gruesome task of identifying the body of Dr. Joseph Warren, the man who sent him on his famous “midnight ride.” Warren was struck down by a British… Read More ›
Ancient Forensics
The Roman empress who used forensic science to identify her rival’s head
In 49 AD, a Roman soldier carried a decaying human head into Rome to present it to the wife of Emperor Claudius, Julia Agrippina. Julia Agrippina, also known as Agrippina the Younger, had ordered the suicide of Lollia Paulina, her formal… Read More ›
A 13th Century Guide to Forensic Anthropology
The oldest existing forensic science text is The Washing Away of Wrongs (also known as the Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified, or Hsi yuan chi lu), written around 1247 CE. Sung Tz’u (or Song Ci), who is considered to be… Read More ›
The ordeal of the bleeding corpse
The history of criminal justice and forensic science is really interesting because of all the absurd rituals and superstitions courts relied on to determine guilt or innocence right up until the 19th century. Before the advent of blood tests, fingerprint analysis, and… Read More ›
The beauty of human decomposition in Japanese watercolor
I think I might be obsessed with kusozu, Japanese watercolor paintings that graphically depict human decomposition, which were popular between the 13th and 19th centuries; Body of a Courtesan in Nine Stages is another series in this genre featured previously on this site. Kusozu works of art were inspired by Buddhist… Read More ›
How the neolithic people of Jericho reconstructed the faces of the dead
Jericho was founded around 9600 BCE and developed into a large settlement with a population of two thousand by about 7000 BCE. During the Neolithic period (abt 10000 BCE to 4500 BCE), the people of Jericho had a mortuary practice of… Read More ›
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