TCNJ

30 WINTER 2017 All that remained of the man when he was found was the skeleton that had once held him upright and had carried him to the place where he died. Time and nature had reclaimed anything else that might have revealed more about him. He had no flesh, no clothes, no personal effects, no name. But his bones told a story that Jared Beatrice could read. The two long bones in the man's right forearm — the radius and the ulna — had been fractured when he was a boy and had not healed properly. The first molar in his lower left jaw had an untreated abscess. The enamel on his front teeth was thinner than it should have been. The back of his skull was speckled with small holes, giving it an oddly porous look. "Normal bone looks smooth," says anthropology professor Jared Beatrice, pointing to a photograph on his office wall of the skull and showing where the bone was not smooth. "All that pitting that you can see almost everywhere? That shouldn't be there." He points to another photograph, of the eye socket, which was similarly pitted. "That should be flat dense bone," he says. "Those pores you see shouldn't be there." Beatrice has been studying bones for 15 years, and he knew immediately that he was looking at another case of porotic hyperostosis: The outer layer of bone had thinned as the inner layer of spongy tissue had thickened. Read together, the skull and the teeth told a story of a man whose boyhood had been marked by deprivation: poor nutrition, anemia, and persistent bouts of other illness. Beatrice had read the same story before in many other sets of bones he had studied as an anthropologist — from 5th-century Greece, 8th-century Italy, and 12th-century Albania. But the man with the broken right arm was from 21st-century Arizona, found in the desert outside Arivaca, not far from the Mexican border, in October 2012. Beatrice had come to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Tucson on a research grant to join his fellow Michigan State University PhD candidate, and future wife, Angela Soler, who had arrived at the office a few months earlier as a postdoctoral fellow. Their job was to try to learn more about the hundreds of bodies that had been found in the Southern Arizona desert whose identities were still unknown. Most were presumed to be undocumented immigrants, part of the grim tally of 2,465 known or presumed border crossers whose remains have ended up since 2001 in the medical examiner's office, which also covers most of the other counties along Arizona's border with Mexico. The office tries to identify each body found in its wide jurisdiction — from DNA, dental records, the things they carried and wore, and whatever other clues their remains may hold — and then return them to their families. Soler's specialty was the recent dead; Beatrice's those who had died centuries before. The job, to their surprise, drew on both their specialties. Says Soler, "The purpose was to identify people, and it just so happened AS FAST AS THE DESERT CAN KILL YOU, IT CAN ALSO REDUCE YOU TO A SKELETON, MAKING THE MEDICAL EXAMINER'S JOB — TO IDENTIFY A BODY AND A CAUSE OF DEATH — ESPECIALLY DIFFICULT.

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