Grave Work - What the Dog Knows - page 168

change in the surrounding soil chemistry rather than ancient remains. Are the dogs alerting
on the pottery urns that human ash was placed in, in some cultures, rather than the ash itself?
Mary is not the only skeptic and not the only researcher trying to develop peer-reviewed
research on the issue. The work on using dogs for archaeological work is just beginning, and
it's all over the map, literally—from Bosnia to Hawaii, from California to the Mississippi
Delta. Since no one has established exactly what volatile organic compounds cause dogs to
alert for more recent deaths, old graves raise even more questions.
“Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return” has a scientific basis. At some point, most
of us rejoin the earth in a way that should confound a cadaver dog as well as any instrument-
ation: We're not grave dirt, we're not dirt mixed with adipocere. We're just dirt, plain and
simple.
How far back can the dog go? It depends on how much scientific verification we want.
Solo has alerted on an eight-hundred-year-old bone from the Mississippi Delta, and I've
watched a number of dogs do the same. And, of course, it depends on what the dog is actually
alerting on—it was thought until recently that it could only be VOCs. The human body
simply lets volatile organic chemicals go up and up, until the body stops communicating in
that fashion. No scent understood as human decomposition should still be holding forth into
the air column. And yet, good dogs, trained on the whole spectrum of decomposition, appear
to know. The soil seems almost permanently changed.
“Scientifically, it's almost impossible to explain,” Arpad Vass said. “It's long gone, so what
could they possibly be picking up?”
• • •
Scarcely had she spoken, when a stiffness seized all her limbs; her bosom began to be enclosed in a
tender bark; her hair became leaves; her arms became branches; her foot stuck fast in the ground, as
a root; her face became a tree-top, retaining nothing of its former self but its beauty. Apollo stood
amazed.
—Apollo and Daphne, Bulfinch's Mythology , 1913
When I watch well-trained cadaver dogs work a possible clandestine burial site or define the
outer perimeters of old cemeteries—throwing their heads, staring up into the trees, even put-
ting their feet up to try to climb them, and bringing their noses deep down into tree roots
growing out of depressions in the earth—I'm fascinated. I tread more lightly in those spots.
As one handler in Mississippi, Gwen Hancock, whispers when she accidentally steps in the
shallow depressions of the nineteenth-century cemetery she and other handlers discovered by