Mass Graves

Mass graves generate widespread interest, as they are often the result of notorious death events. As crime scenes they have great evidential potential, forming one element of a forensic landscape often resulting from serious infringements of international law. The scale of mass graves provides opportunity for a broad range of forensic disciplines to contribute to recovering physical evidence for criminal investigations and to account for and identify the missing. Mass grave taphonomic and evidential phenomena have been observed and studied for 80 years, more recently refining processes of evidence recording and recovery. Forensic science can now provide wide-ranging analysis to support mass grave investigations.