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13 Hum. Rts. Q. 291 (1991)
Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell

handle is hein.journals/hurq13 and id is 301 raw text is: BOOK REVIEWS WITNESSES FROM THE GRAVE: THE STORIES BONES TELL, by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover (Boston: University of Massachu- setts Press, 1991), 305 pp. $19.95 The homicidal state shares one trait with the solitary killer-like all murderers, it trips on its own egotism and drops a trail of clues which, when properly collected, preserved, and analyzed are as damning as a signed confession left in the grave. The great mass murderers of our time have accounted for no more than a few hundred victims. In contrast, states that have chosen to murder their own citizens can usually count their victims by the car- load lot. As for motive, the state has no peers, for it will kill its victim for a careless word, a fleeting thought, or even a poem. (p. 217) The above quotation is from a talk by Clyde Snow at the 1984 annual meeting of the American Association for the Ad- vancement of Science regarding the pos- sible contribution that scientists could of- fer to the relatives of the disappeared in Argentina. I had the opportunity to hear Clyde Snow's slide show presen- tation at an excellent 1989 conference at Wellesley College devoted to the subject Science in Aid of Human Rights. The Wellesley presentation focused upon his work in Argentina in locating the graves of the disappeared and reconstructing from the remains who they were and how they met their deaths. I found myself to- tally captivated by the presentation, not because of the eloquence of Snow as might be suggested by the excerpt quoted above; rather, it was a combination of a subject matter that was new to me, the effective use of slides, and most impor- tantly the character of Dr. Clyde Snow. Common to the great teachers I have known is an enthusiasm for the subject matter, and it was clear that Clyde Snow was fascinated by the study of bones. His credentials as a brilliant scientist were apparent. As a detective, he rivals Sher- lock Holmes. Snow noted that part of the failure of the Argentine military in cov- ering up their atrocities was not appre- ciating that the individuals in charge of crematoriums are bureaucrats and thus they keep accurate records. He was able to determine the significant increases in N.N. (no name) graves, especially of young people, in cemeteries located near the torture centers in the period of dis- appearances. But the power of Snow was the consequence not only of a sense of sagacity wrought from having seen the dark side of human nature but a sense that Clyde Snow was an incorruptibly de- cent human being. So impressed was I that I asked Clyde Snow to open the first Annual Meeting of the Amnesty International USA Legal Support Network which we hosted at the Morgan Institute. When the lights were turned back on, I do not recall seeing any dry eyes in this audience of human rights lawyers. I relate this experience because the talented science writers Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover set Clyde Snow's work in Argentina in the development of the field of forensic anthropology. The setting of the table includes the 1849 dis- memberment murder of one Harvard sci- entist by another, the dissolving of his wife in a vat by a Chicago sausage manu- facturer, the 1970s case of John Wayne Human Rights Quarterly 13 (1991) 291-292 o 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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