Kathy Reichs: Cross bones

You betcha! I’d started my career as an archaeologist. So had Tempe. Why not involve the old gal in archaeological intrigue? I agreed to meet and, over lunch, Tabor showed me pictures and clippings, and outlined the following.

From 1963 to 1965, Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin and an international team of volunteers excavate the Israeli site of Masada. Twenty-five skeletons and a fetus are found in a cave below the casement wall at the southern tip of the summit. Yadin does not discuss these bones with the press, though he does discuss three skeletons found by his team in the main complex of ruins at the northern end of the summit. Nor are the cave bones documented by the project’s physical anthropologist, Nicu Haas. Save for mention in an appendix, neither the bones nor the contents of the cave are described in the six volumes of the finalMasada excavation publication.

Thirty years pass. A photo surfaces of a single intact skeleton lying in the same cave from which Yadin’s team excavated the twenty-five jumbled individuals. Yadin never described the intact skeleton in published reports or interviews.

Intrigued, Tabor locates transcripts of staff briefings held in lieu of field notes during the Masada excavation. Pages covering the period of the discovery and clearing of the skeleton cave are missing.

Tabors tracks down Nicu Haas’s original handwritten notes. It is clear from his bone inventory that Haas has never seen the complete, articulated skeleton.

Tabor researches newspaper articles dating to the period of the Masada excavation. He finds a statement made by Yadin to a journalist in the late sixties that it is not his job to request carbon-14 testing. Tabor checks the journalRadiocarbon, and finds that, during the sixties, Yadin did, in fact, send samples from other sites for carbon-14 testing.

I looked at the small black-and-white photo of that single skeleton. I looked at photocopies of Haas’s notes and of the transcribed staff sessions. I was hooked. But Tabor wasn’t finished.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2000. While hiking the Hinnom Valley with students, Tabor and Israeli archaeologist Shimon Gibson stumble upon a freshly robbed tomb. They excavate and discover smashed ossuaries and skeletal remains wrapped in a burial shroud. Carbon-14 testing dates the shroud to the first century. DNA sequencing shows a familial relationship among individuals buried in the tomb. Ossuary fragments bear the names Mary and Salome.

Fast-forward again. October 2002. An antiquities collector announces the existence of a first-century ossuary inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The collector states that the box was purchased in 1978, but Tabor has found circumstantial evidence suggesting it was taken during the looting of his shroud tomb two years earlier. The construction matches. The decoration matches. Rumors have surfaced in Jerusalem.

Tabor considers it a serious possibility that he has stumbled onto the Jesus family tomb. In 2003, he requests bone from the “James ossuary” for mitochondrial DNA testing. He wants to compare sequencing from that bone with sequencing yielded by his “shroud” tomb lineage. The director of the Israel Antiquities Authority denies his request, explaining that the case is under investigation and in the hands of the police.

Mysterious skeletons. Missing pages. Looted tombs. The Jesus family crypt? Hot diggety! I would return to my archaeological roots and send Tempe to the Holy Land! My mind was already weaving plots as I studied Tabor’s photos and maps. But how to bring Ryan and the others along?

At times, coroners and medical examiners must order autopsies despite the protest of family members. Occasionally objections spring from religious convictions.

During my tenure at the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, a number of autopsies have been performed on ultra-Orthodox Jews who have been the victims of violence. Protocol has been modified, to the extent possible, to accommodate religious concerns.

That was it! I would start with a homicide in Montreal, then send Tempe into Jerusalem and the West Bank.

For a year I pored over transcripts, catalogs, and newspaper articles. I studied photos of ossuaries and the Masada excavation. I read books on Roman Palestine and the historical Jesus. With Tabor, I flew to Israel and visited museums, digs, tombs, and historic sites. I talked to antiquities dealers, archaeologists, scientists, and members of the Israel National Police.

And, as they say, the rest is history.

Kathy Reichs is forensic anthropologist for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina, and for the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale for the province of Quebec. She is one of sixty-five forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and served on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. A professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr. Reichs is a native of Chicago, where she received her Ph. D. at Northwestern. She now divides her time between Charlotte and Montreal and is a frequent expert witness at criminal trials. Her first novel, Déjà Dead, brought Dr. Reichs fame when it became a New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Death du Jour, Deadly Décisions, Fatal Voyage, Grave Secrets, Bare Bones, andMonday Mourning also became international andNew York Times bestsellers. Cross Bones is her eighth novel featuring Temperance Brennan.