Our Faculty: Jules Angel

Gaining hands-on experience in field schools

Ever want to dig up bones?

Hang out with Dr. Jules Angel long enough, and that might be what you end up doing.

Angel is a senior lecturer within Ohio State’s Department of Anthropology and teaches a pair of field schools: a bioarchaeology field school and a forensic field school. She also teaches a course, Introduction to Forensic Science (ANTHROP 3211), that touches on subjects of both field schools and can be taken concurrently with the forensic field school.

“If you’re interested in any aspect of forensics, criminal justice, investigation, anthropology, anything like that at all, come take these classes,” Angel said. “There’s something for everyone in there.”

The bioarchaeology field school, Angel says, is all about trying to find the skeletons of people for further analyses. The first four weeks of summer semester, students gathered at an undisclosed gravesite in Pickaway County. The students work to identify and read the layers of earth that have been disturbed to find a grave shaft. Once they find the grave shaft, they must meticulously but efficiently remove the earth to find the bones.

Once bones are found, the work begins to expose, measure and photograph them before delicately extracting them.

“The students learn how to read soil, how to read earth, how to read what we call the stratigraphy, the layers of earth that have built up over time,” Angel said. “They get to understand the methods and techniques archaeologists use to move down through the ground efficiently and effectively but also with as little damage as possible to whatever we’re looking for. They understand paperwork, how to take notes, how to take photographs, use surveying equipment. They understand how to identify which bones are which, how to extract them safely and carefully and how to curate them so that they can be analyzed later. So they get a full, hands-on understanding of what it means to be an archaeologist in the field.”

The forensic science field school borrows some elements from the archaeology field school, but this time, students learn crime scene processing, evidence collection and how to be an expert witness in court.

The forensic field school is an abbreviated version of the field school Angel developed in 2007, but the content, Angel says, is more or less the same. The course takes place fall of 2018, and Angel will construct fake crime scenes outside of Smith Laboratory and inside Evans Laboratory. The mock crime scenes will be simple — maybe a knife on the floor, some fingerprints on a desk and bone fragments — and the students will learn how to deduce what is evidence and what isn’t, dig up faux burial sites and perform biological analysis on bones. Students will also learn about indoor and outdoor crime scene photography and how to interact with police departments and investigators.

“They work in a structured way, trying to understand the methods needed and the techniques needed to gather evidence,” Angel said. “We’re not gathering evidence for the police because they do that, but to give them an idea of what it’s like, what the police will need and what is evidence and what isn’t evidence.”

Angel’s experience in bioarchaeology and forensics is vast. She spent 10 years with Scotland Yard as a crime scene photographer, attending over 2,500 crime scenes to photograph evidence. She also has 20 years’ experience in forensic work in both New Mexico and Ohio. She is currently co-director of the Department of Anthropology’s Forensic Anthropology Case Team (FACT), which partners with local law enforcement agencies to help investigate Ohio murder cases. Since 2004, FACT has worked on more than 75 cases for various county agencies, coroner’s offices, the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI.

The field schools have class sizes at around 17 students. Angel says the courses need to remain relatively small.

“You’ve got to supervise people doing something they’ve never done before on a site,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re going to find until you start digging it up, and you’ve got to teach them and show them things as well.”

Angel hopes to teach the bioarchaeology field school again next summer semester and the forensic field school every fall. Those who take the field schools, Angel says, have very positive reactions to them.

“The students love them,” she said. “They fill up within just a couple of weeks, if that. The reaction has always been very good. We haven’t had an archaeology field school in central Ohio for the better part of 20 years as far as I know. So this is a really good experience to do that.”