MURFREESBORO — If your knowledge of one of the most studied conflicts in
U.S. military history, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, has come from movies,
paintings and songs, it’s time to get the facts.
A pair of forensic
scientists who’ve studied the 1876 clash on the shores of the Little Bighorn
River in south central Montana will visit MTSU on Thursday, March 27, with the
archaeological evidence that tells a more complete story.
Drs. Douglas D. Scott
and P. Willey are the spring 2014 speakers for MTSU’s William M. Bass Legends
in Forensic Science Lectureship. Their talk, “Bullets and Bones from the Battle
of the Little Bighorn," is set for 6:30 p.m. March 27 in the Tennessee
Room of MTSU’s James Union Building.
The lecture is free
and open to the public, and parking will be available in the Bell Street Lot
across the street from the JUB. A searchable campus map with parking details is
available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap13-14.
MTSU’s Forensic
Institute for Research and Education, or FIRE, is sponsoring Scott and Willey’s
free public lecture. The Bass Lecture Series, named for renowned University of
Tennessee forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass, brings respected
forensic-science experts to campus each fall and spring.
Scott and Willey will explain how the archaeological
evidence at the Little Bighorn site, where Gen. George Custer’s 7th Cavalry
Regiment was soundly defeated by the warriors of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne
and Arapaho tribes, reveals the weapons used and equipment carried and the locations where the men
fought and died. Their bones have helped the investigators understand their
true ages, heights and illnesses and how they died.
Scott, a forensic archaeologist often
called "battlefield archaeology's founding father," is an adjunct
professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Nebraska–Lincoln and at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction.
He is a National Park Service
retiree with more than 30 years of service, including his final post as Great
Plains team leader for the Midwest Archeological Center in Lincoln, Neb.
Scott received the Department of
the Interior's Distinguished Service Award in 2002 for his research at the
Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. He has also been involved with
human rights and forensic investigations since the early 1990s.
Willey, a physical anthropologist
who specializes in human skeletal remains and historical medical anthropology,
is a professor at California State University-Chico. Before joining that
faculty, he curated the Bass skeletal collection at the University of
Tennessee.
His research interests include
human skeletons, especially those resulting from battles, along with footprints
left by prehistoric cavers and illnesses suffered by the 7th Cavalry in the post–Civil War period. He has written more than 90
publications on those and other subjects.
Among his many
affiliations, Willey has been a consultant to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting
Command’s Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, the largest
skeletal identification laboratory in the world, since 1997.
The Little Bighorn
battle site was first preserved as a U.S. national cemetery in 1879 to protect
the graves of the 7th Cavalry troopers. In 1946, it was redesignated as the
Custer Battlefield National Monument, but it took another 45 years to
acknowledge the Native American sacrifices made there when the site was renamed
the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.
FIRE’s co-sponsors
for Scott and Willey’s lecture are the MTSU Distinguished Lecture Fund, the
College of Liberal Arts, the Department of History and the Middle Tennessee
Forensic Science Society.
In addition to the
Bass lecture series, MTSU’s FIRE, established in 2007, provides regular
educational and training opportunities for law enforcement, medical examiners,
coroners, attorneys, social workers, and other groups in forensic science and
homeland security. FIRE also sponsors the popular CSI:MTSU camp for high school
students each summer.
For more information
on the March 27 lecture, please contact the FIRE offices at 615-494-7713 or
visit http://www.mtsu.edu/fire.
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