One morning in July 2005, Amy Mundorff rode into the Bosnian countryside, tagging along with a team from the International Commission on Missing Persons. The roads wound past forests, farmland and villages. The group stopped near a field in a hilly area on the outskirts of a village to meet an informant. From the gestures and the translator’s comments, Mundorff understood that the ground beneath the field might hold bodies.
The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina had ended 10 years earlier, but thousands of people remained missing, many presumed buried in hidden graves scattered across the country. Mundorff, a forensic anthropologist, wanted to learn how the team excavated and exhumed graves, and then sorted and identified co-mingled human remains — her area of expertise.
Backhoes scraped away the topsoil, peeling back the earth inches at a time. “They just dug and dug and dug,” recalls Mundorff. Once in a while, the machinery ...
