The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. is currently hosting a new forensic anthropology exhibit – Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th-Century Chesapeake. The exhibit is made up of skeletal remains – human bones unearthed in recent decades from the earliest settlements of seventeenth-century Maryland and Virginia.
The exhibit draws on the resources of 20 institutions, including Anne Arundel County’s Lost Towns Project, the Maryland Historical Trust and the Maryland State Archives. It’s taken five years to put it together.
Displays explore the human skeleton, the science of forensic anthropology, and how its practitioners are using twenty-first-century scientific tools to piece together the stories of the hard lives and forgotten deaths of the earliest European-Americans.
The exhibit will run through February 6, 2011.
Read all about the exhibit, and the stories told by the bones of a number of the exhibits in an article written by Frank D. Roylance in the February 16, 2009 edition of the Baltimore Sun.