Australia needs its own crack team of archaeologists to investigate natural disasters, terrorist attacks or mass graves, UQ research shows.
UQ social science student Megan Clift, who researched mass graves for her honours thesis, said the Australian Federal Police (AFP) disaster response teams could benefit from having trained archaeologists.
Miss Clift said the AFP did excellent work in East Timor and Bali and having more archaeological skills at forensic sites could yield even higher quality evidence for courts or international tribunals.
This is certainly true in many cases (911 used many archaeologists to sift through the rubble for remains), but we wonder whether regular forensic anthropologists have the relevant expertise to obtain good data from these contexts (we think they do, mostly). We have seen references to forensic archaeology though.
Update: Okay, then we found this: Raising the dead
A leading archaeologist has given up his gentle academic life in order to exhume bodies and use his skills in a different way - helping police solve murders and locating victims of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.
. . .
Hunter began forensic work in the 1980s when he noticed how crude police techniques for finding and exhuming bodies were.
"I'd see TV pictures of men in boiler suits with spades and think: 'they must be losing a lot of evidence.'
"The fact is archaeology is all about the dead, and learning from their remains. It has got to be right to apply these skills in a way that makes a difference to the living."
So, maybe we can offer up something in those cases that aren't excavated by either forensic anthropologists or, you know, Gil Grissom.