Collegiate Times

08.26.08 centerpiece

The skeletal remains found in a Giles County lake two weeks ago have yet to be identified, though Virginia Tech and Radford professors have investigated the scene.

Currently, the bones are at Radford University, said Giles County Sheriff Morgan Millirons. In addition to the remains, investigators found a gold class ring, belt buckle, silver case, and a pair of shoes at the bottom of the lake.

The gold class ring had the initials "MC" on one side and "CA" on the other. On top of the stone, "04" was engraved. The belt buckle and silver case -- most likely to be for cigarettes -- had the initials "SCF" engraved on both, Millirons said.

"We currently don't have anything with leads on who the person is," Millirons said. "We found a tooth, but it was decayed with a metal stud with a root canal and we don't know if it was part of the body that was found."

Donna Boyd, a Radford professor of anthropology, is currently testing the bones to hopefully gather more information about the individual.

"We are going to be doing a biological profile, trying to figure out the age and perhaps the sex of the individual to reconstruct who they were," Boyd said. "We also want to find out what happened before and after their death."

To figure out a biological profile of the bones, a person must have knowledge of osteology -- the study of bones.

"The remains are fragmented and fragile," Boyd said. "We are doing an inventory of all the remains that were found. Some are in small fragments and we are trying to clean them up."

Boyd said that by looking at the deterioration of the bone, and wear and tear a scientists can figure out the age and what sort of diseases the person may have had. The bone structures in the face can give an idea of the ethnicity or race of the remains, and the shape and size of bones can determine the sex.

"The science that studies what happens to an organism after it dies is known as tathonomy," Boyd said. "This is important because we need to be able to differentiate what happened before or after the body died."

Dating the actual bones is not possible because radio carbon dating is for bones between 250 and 75,000 years old.

"There is no good way to date these bones except for the associated artifacts that were found," Boyd said.  

Retired Tech professor Bruce Parker said that boulders formed a dam that created Mountain Lake. Mountain Lake is one of two natural lakes in Virginia, and is also very unique, Parker said.

"(The lake) exhibited fluctuations in water levels that I had not seen before and had not occurred anywhere else in the world," Parker said.

Students from Parker's classes went to Mountain Lake to take sediment samples from 1969-2002. Parker still makes visits to the lake to collect samples. The professor and students were planning on going to Antarctica, and wanted to work with a lake that was comparable to ones they would encounter there. To do this, they began the research and sampling at Mountain Lake. Core samples were taken from the lake and can be comparable to looking at tree rings to determine the age, said Parker. The top of the sediment is the most recent with the bottom being the oldest.

"After the sample is taken, it is frozen solid and put on a band saw and cut down the middle," Parker said. "You can look at the half of the sample core that has been frozen solid and see it has different grain sizes."

Another technique is looking at the grass, fern and moss spores in the sample. Parker said when those are present, a low lake level was present at that time. If there is a predominance of tree pollen present, the lake level was high at the time.

Parker said that core samples have been shown that the lake has dried up completely at least six times.