Written on Bones. Secrets Left Behind

Our bones are silent witnesses to the life we lead, and our entire biography is recorded upon them. Based on years of research and vast professional experience, world-renowned forensic anthropologist, Dame Sue Black, OBE invites us on an incredible journey filled with unexpected discoveries. Each part of our body, from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet — skull, face, spine, ribcage, arms, pelvis, legs — tells its own story. Everything we eat, where we travel, what we do leaves a trace that patiently waits for months, years, or even centuries for a forensic anthropologist to decipher it. Some of this information is obvious, but the rest is pure mystery, requiring scientific knowledge to unravel. By piecing together information bit by bit, one can reconstruct the details of a person's life. In every case — criminal, historical, or simply unusual — Sue Black narrates with her characteristic thoughtfulness and unwavering compassion stories about what remains after us through the bones. The work of a forensic anthropologist is to 'read' bones like a chronicle, guiding her imaginary pen along them in search of fragments of bodily memory that form the song of human life, and to connect them as they once sounded.