Up for auction "The Body Farm" William M. Bass Hand Signed Announcement Dated 1984. This item is authenticated
By Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.
ES-7944E
William
Marvin Bass III (born
August 30, 1928) is an American forensic anthropologist,
best known for his research on human osteology and human decomposition. He
has also assisted federal, local, and non-U.S. authorities in the
identification of human remains. He taught at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and founded
the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, the
first such facility in the world. The Facility is more popularly known as
"The Body Farm", a name used by crime author Patricia Cornwell in a novel of the same name, which
drew inspiration from Bass and his work. Bass has also described the body farm
as "Death's Acre" – the title of the book on his life and career,
co-written with journalist Jon Jefferson. Jefferson and Bass, under the pen name
"Jefferson Bass", have also written several fictional works: Carved
In Bone, Flesh and Bone, The Devil's Bones, Bones
of Betrayal, The Bone Thief, The Bone Yard, The
Inquisitor's Key, Cut To the Bone, and The Breaking
Point. Though currently retired from teaching, Bass still plays an active
research role in the University's forensic anthropology program. Bass was born
in Staunton, Virginia to
Marvin and Jenny Bass. His father was a manager of gold mines and
limestone quarries. His mother received a degree in home economics in 1925.
Bass attended Hampden-Sydney College before
transferring his junior year to the University of Virginia for
his undergraduate degree in psychology, which he received in 1951, and was a scholar at
the US Army Medical Research Laboratory from 1953 to 1954, where he
studied psychophysiology. He received his master's from the University of Kentucky in
1956. He completed his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in
1961. His research career began as an archaeologist, excavating Native
American grave sites in the Midwestern United States during the
latter 1950s and 1960s. He mentions in Death's Acre that this
activity earned him the informal title "Indian grave-robber number
one" from an Indian activist, though no clashes with Native Americans ever
occurred. He worked briefly at the universities
of Kansas and Nebraska during this
time. He was hired by the University of Tennessee in 1971 to head their
anthropology department, which was in the process of being split from the
history department at the time.
Dr. Bass first got the idea for what would eventually become the body
farm while he was at the University of Kansas in the 1960s, and was asked if it
was possible to determine the time of death of a partially decomposed cow. He
determined that additional research was need for this, and suggested that this
could be accomplished by allowing a deceased cow to decompose in a field while
studying the process. While this experiment was never conducted, Dr. Bass
further realized that additional research on human decomposition was needed
after he was summoned in December 1977 to examine what was initially assumed to
be a recent murder victim that had been buried on top of the grave of a Confederate soldier
in Franklin, Tennessee who
had been killed at the Battle of Nashville in
1864. Due to the fact that the body was relatively intact and still contained
most of its flesh, he initially estimated that the body had been dead for less
than a year, but examination of the victim's clothing determined that the body
was that of the soldier buried in the grave. Grave robbers had punctured
the cast iron coffin, which was airtight and largely
prevented decomposition, removed the body, and then reburied it on top of the
coffin. He started the university's anthropological research facility in 1980,
which was the first in the world. He established the university's Forensic
Anthropology Center in 1987. Most
of Bass' research has been on osteology and human decomposition. Bass'
research, along with his graduate students, has made many advances in how to
determine the cause and time of death of a person and the conditions in which
death took place. His research has formed the basis of techniques used by
medical examiners, forensic pathologists, homicide detectives, and other law
enforcement personnel in postmortem investigations. Later, Bass began
researching cremation. In
addition to his research, Bass has also assisted law enforcement in forensic
investigations. He has investigated multiple high-profile cases, including the
1983 Benton fireworks disaster, the Tri-State Crematory
scandal, and the 2007 exhumation and autopsy of The Big Bopper, in which he determined the cause of death,
which had not been confirmed initially. Bass is the third generation in his
family to have an educational building named after him. The Dr. William M. Bass
III Forensic Anthropology Building dedication ceremony was September 27, 2011,
near the Body Farm.