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Finding 700 fractured bones four months after Sept. 11, 2001, on a rooftop right next to where the Twin Towers used to stand was as surprising as it was interesting for Bradley Adams.
The bones came from the passengers of the United Airlines flight that went through the North Tower, concluded Adams, who works in the office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York and was one of four notable speakers who came to discuss anthropology at the sixth Chico Forensic Conference on Saturday.
When he went to the rooftop of Deutsche Bank to look at some of the bone fragments, it was difficult to sort them out because so many of them looked like stones, he said.
"A lot of people ask, 'How can you not notice 700 bone fragments?'" Adams said. "Well, it's not like their bodies were lying around. These are really small fragments; they look like rocks. Everything was really small."
The free conference, held in Ayres Hall, brought out about 200 students and faculty members who watched the specialists present and discuss different types of anthropology and their applications.
Graduate student Ashley Hutchinson, who is studying anthropology and helped organize the event, wanted to make sure audience members knew exactly what forensic anthropology really means.
"We want to educate the public," Hutchinson said. "With shows out like 'Bones' and 'CSI,' there's a misconception among the public about what our field is really like."
Senior Rochelle Peterson, anthropology minor, enjoys coming out and watching the forensic conferences whenever they're offered, she said.
"All the speakers are really funny and intelligent," Peterson said. "I came to a lecture a couple years ago. They always choose good speakers."
Steven Symes, an associate professor of forensic sciences at Mercyhurst College, discussed how he sometimes observes the deceased, and testifies in court on his findings.
In one circumstance, he observed a case in which it was unclear whether a certain man slipped and fell off a 300-foot cliff or was pushed off by his brother-in-law.
"I needed to figure out: Was the man beaten before he fell off the cliff, were his injuries due to the fall, or some combination?" Symes said.
Symes then explained the process of how he looked at the fractured bones and made conclusions on his findings and presented those conclusions to a jury.
"Most anthropologists don't testify in court; I do, but most don't," Symes said. "We don't know all of the answers, especially in cases of bone trauma. (Anthropologists) raise more questions than we answer, which make a lot of lawyers unhappy."
Jason Wiersema of the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office discussed anthropology in the forensic context, and Roland Wessling, a research officer in forensic anthropology at Cranfield University, discussed preservation of human remains in single, multiple and mass graves.
The conference generally happens annually, but this year was the first in a few years because of a drop in funding from the Associated Students, Hutchinson said.
To compensate, the conference ended with a raffle event to help raise funds for the department.
"We've been selling T-shirts and raffle tickets to help raise money for the anthropology department, because it has been consistently getting less money from A.S. each year," Hutchinson said.
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