More often, Stover and his teams interview villagers who witnessed or heard of massacres. Among the rolling hills of Bosnian farmlands, the teams of forensic anthropologists and medical students trained to exhume and identify bodies begin their grisly and physically exhausting search for evidence. The forensic teams move in on suspected sites, usually after the areas are cleared of land mines. They sweep the site with metal detectors to find bullet casings and then move across it on hands and knees for fear of disturbing evidence, tearing out all vegetation. When the land is bare, they look for sunken soil where the ground recently has collapsed or places where the earth is a different color from that around it.
Some workers even use chopsticks or dental picks.
Since the human body has 206 bones, Stover said, it's painstaking work. All the finger bones from one skeleton go together in one sack, pelvic bones in another, and so forth. In Bosnia, an abandoned garment factory was used. Both the dig and the lab work can uncover damning evidence. Single gunshot wounds to the head usually signal an execution-style killing, said Stover.