Archaeolog

Note: a more detailed version of this entry with photographs is forthcoming in Past Bodies: An Archaeology of Bodily Practices, edited by Dusan Boric & John Robb, to be published by Berghahn Books.

Forensic experts including a team of archaeologists examined bodies from the site of Batajnica near Belgrade, capital of Serbia & Montenegro. It was suspected that the bodies from several mass graves originated from different events and from different places in Kosovo and Metohija. Sorting through human debris archaeologists looked for clues to how people died and to their identities, and also tried to detach the daily life from the clothed bodies in the ground that went together with it. This paper discusses the complex nature of the contemporary mass grave site and the role of the archaeologist in interpreting the data. It also deals with the relationship between the sensual and bodily imprints, and the life on site during the process of exhumation. (footnote: The original idea for the paper was to engage in a kind of dialog with the essay by Lindsey Weiss [2006] “Terra incognita: The material world in international criminal courts”, which discussed the nature of evidence presented in the Balkan war crime trials in the Hague Tribunal).

Coming back from excavations at a Neolithic site in Turkey, in mid-summer 2002 I joined the members of Batajnica mass grave site research team (under the auspices of International committee on missing people [ICMP] and Forensic Institute of Belgrade) that already included three physical anthropologists, two medical anthropologists, two autopsy specialists, two technicians from the Belgrade morgue, and four archaeologists. All members of the team had to fill in papers saying that we would not reveal any kind of information that we come across during the course of our work. The names of the people on the team were being kept secret, as there were people in Serbia who were unhappy that Batajnica exhumations were taking place (IWPR 2002), and certainly the sentiment was similar within the Serbian police forces – and maybe more so within the complex that belonged to the special antiterrorist unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Things can be mixed up during an excavation. Consequently, objects can be easily misplaced during our archaeological taxonomies. This was the case with the human-tooth pendant found at the excavation of the lakeside Neolithic settlement of Dispilio in Greece . During the study of the personal ornaments assemblage of the site I made the quite paranoid decision to check up on all the bags of material found during the twelve-year-old excavation. A decision that, in several ways, could be considered as the excavation of the already excavated. In many cases the results were worth this time-consuming decision. Quite a lot ornaments were found in the bone bags especially. Probably some of the students were not ready enough to distinguish the differences of a ‘worked’ and an ‘unworked’ bone fragment. Maybe it was the muddy condition of the excavation site, lying near the lake of Kastoria, that obstructed their recognition.

A small bag of the bones found on a small excavation cluster contained this human tooth. Mud was covering its upper perforation. A humble perforation, but simultaneously a conscious one. Instantly the tooth was alienated from the bag; cleared; nursed.

Figure 1: The human tooth-pendant (code K0325). Photo: F. Ifantidis. Drawing: I. Zaloshnya/Dispilio Excavations.