








































Forensic Anthropology Vol. 2, No. 2: 139–142
DOI: 10.5744/fa.2019.1020

© 2019 University of Florida Press

“Individual identification is a primary goal for forensic 
anthropologists who work in medicolegal and humanitarian 
contexts,” Palmiotto et al. set out in the opening of their tech-
nical note on methods of estimating the minimum number 
of individuals among commingled remains. No doubt they 
are right, but their claim has context, as does the more gen-
eral practice of disentangling and piecing back together 
bodies— more precisely, their skeletal elements, however par-
tial or fragmented— that the eight contributions to this spe-
cial issue address. Simply put, individually identifying war 
dead, or victims of violent conflict, natural disaster, or what-
ever incident of mass fatality, is a relatively modern phe-
nomenon. As historian Thomas Laqueur argues, “We live 
in an age of necronominalism; we record and gather the 
names of the dead in ways, and in places, and in numbers 
as never before. We demand to know who the dead are. We 
find unnamed bodies and bodiless names— those of the 
disappeared— unbearable” (2015:366; emphasis added).

There was a time, before this age of heightened 
“necronominalism,” when neither science nor society 
required or could accomplish the painstaking act of naming 
the masses of dead and especially their disarticulated and 
commingled remains.

In many ways, this collection of research articles, case 
studies, and technical notes bears witness to the social value 
increasingly ascribed to individuated postmortem identifica-
tion and the forensic scientific efforts both driven by and 
enabling that value— a prime example of what science and 
technology studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff calls the “co- 
production” of science and society (2004). Across these 
analyses of commingled cases and methods, technologies, 
and techniques applied to resolve them, we recognize the 
common aim of restoring individual identity to remains, no 
matter their state or how many generations removed their 

primary next of kin. While there is not room here to delve 
too deeply into how such a value emerged, this special 
issue invites us to consider some of its implications. I’ll start 
with one of the most important dynamics affected by 
efforts to untangle and name the commingled: the relation-
ship between the individual and the collective.

Individual versus Collective

We tend to think of commingling in terms of the dead, the 
individual dead whose remains must be separated out from 
an aggregate. How many people are buried in a mass grave, 
or which bones belong to which body? We might give thought 
to how the individuals ended up as a collective or in a com-
mon burial site to begin with: their social identities (fellow 
combatants buried together, or victims targeted because they 
were perceived to belong to a common group and thus were 
killed and disposed of en masse); the nature of the violence, 
so forceful that it decimated identity and perhaps jumbled 
bodies; or, as becomes clear from the U.S. military’s World 
War II recovery efforts, well- intentioned but unsuccessful 
attempts to exhume and name them. In their posthumous 
lives, these recovered remains become collectives of a dif-
ferent sort: the Tarawa Project, the Cabanatuan Project, and 
the USS Oklahoma Project. The dead populate spreadsheets 
and shortlists; they become central objects in a world of sort-
ing and reordering.

But what of the living, especially those most closely tied 
to the deceased? We see their traces in some of these chap-
ters. Family reference samples are requested; relatives may 
be notified of potential re- exhumations. Just as the commin-
gled dead have become enmeshed in a collective not of their 
own making— first in mass burial, next in recovery and iden-
tification efforts— the social networks of those individuals 
likewise become entangled. Take Pfc Alpha from the Caba-
natuan Project, for example (Megyesi, this issue). Buried in 
a common grave in the Philippines, his remains were 
exhumed and identified by the American Graves  Registration 
Service and, in 1949, sent home and buried again in a family 

CONCLUSION

Conclusion

Sarah Wagnera

aDepartment of Anthropology, George Washington University, 
Washington, DC 20052, USA

*Correspondence to: Sarah Wagner, Department of Anthropology, 
George Washington University, 2110 G St. NW, Washington,  
DC 20052, USA 

E- mail: sewagner@gwu . edu



140 Conclusion

plot in the United States. Or so his family and community of 
mourners thought. Presumably, some among them tended 
that plot, visiting it from time to time and on special occa-
sions. Fast- forward to the 2014 disinterment, when the 
present- day efforts to account for the unresolved Cabanatuan 
losses exposed past errors, including the misidentification of 
Pfc Alpha, whose actual remains were found among three 
separate caskets. And so the casket holding the erroneously 
buried Alpha had to come out of the ground, and its contents 
shipped to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s 
(DPAA) Central Identification Laboratory in Hawai‘i for 
examination. In that moment, we see how the Alpha family 
belongs to a larger collective— that of war dead relatives, in 
particular those whose missing have not yet been recovered 
and identified; in some respects, they had a duty to those 
other families. The proper restoration of identity to the 
remains mistakenly buried in their family plot could only be 
possible if that casket was unearthed. We are left to wonder: 
How much of the “real” Pfc Alpha will finally return home? 
Who has survived to bury him anew/for the first time? Will 
the other next of kin— we learn that there are the remains of 
at least two individuals in his former casket— feel a sense of 
gratitude toward the Alpha family for tending the grave 
where their missing were mistakenly buried?

A strange sociality, putative or realized, arises among 
the relatives of these commingled dead. For some, the disin-
terments forge ties of reciprocity hitherto unimagined. In this 
regard, the Alpha case presents a fairly straightforward exam-
ple, but other World War II disinterments, including some 
from the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, have 
proved more fraught terrain for the DPAA. Making headlines 
beginning in 2014 and continuing to this day, a set of fami-
lies whose missing war dead they believe to be buried as 
unknowns in the Manila Cemetery have banded together to 
sue the U.S. government: they seek to force the disinterment 
of the graves of their (presumed) relatives’ remains.1 The 
lawsuit exposes an underlying tension between individual 
wants and needs and collective values. In insisting that the 
DPAA focus resources on their particular missing, namely, 
seven cases from among the 72,000 unaccounted- for from 
World War II, the plaintiffs argue for individuated attention. 
They separate out their missing fallen from the collective, 
seeking to jump the queue as it were, by seizing the levers 
of the courts to demand that attention.

But, as we can intuit from the three major disinterment/
group projects outlined in this special issue— Cabanatuan, 
Tarawa, and Oklahoma— there is a strong possibility that the 
seven cases are bound up— literally, physically commingled—
with multiple other unknowns. Though perhaps not as 

1. Dave Philipps, “War hero’s family suing in its decades- long fight to 
identify remains,” New York Times, May 29, 2017, https:// www . nytimes 
. com / 2017 / 05 / 29 / us / veterans - graves - alexander - nininger . html, accessed 
January 22, 2019.

extreme as the Oklahoma “bundles” of mixed- up remains 
interred in individual caskets (see Brown, this issue), the 
minimum number of individuals will hardly be seven. Dis-
interments unearth more than just coffins and bones. They 
simultaneously raise new and challenge old obligations. We 
know that approximately 40% of World War II war dead 
were buried overseas, the majority of them at their families’ 
wish, in the national cemeteries created in the war’s after-
math, including in the Philippines (Edwards 2015:70; Piehler 
1995:129– 130). By default, unknowns comprised some part 
of that figure. Does the court have an obligation to consider 
a choice which hypothetically families of the other commin-
gled unknowns might have made? Or to broach a corollary 
question: What if there are no descendants to respect the 
wishes of primary next of kin that their loved one’s grave, no 
matter if unknown and unmarked, be left undisturbed? Two 
and three generations removed, it is difficult to know what 
unnamed relatives of the still unknown would have wanted. 
That uncertainty reminds us that biological inheritance 
(DNA samples) can neither capture nor convey the stuff of 
social memory, and that neither science nor the law offers 
any quick and easy fix to the complexities inherent in proj-
ects that seek to “untangle the effects of commingling and 
account for past misidentifications” (Megyesi, this issue).

Social Demands

A second important implication raised by the various con-
tributions to this special issue centers on the extraordinary 
lengths to which societies go to desegregate and individually 
identify commingled remains. Why take such pains? Having 
previously studied the example of postwar Bosnia and Her-
zegovina (Wagner 2008), I was struck by how the U.S. mili-
tary’s efforts to account for its missing in action (MIA) 
overlap in certain aspects of scientific approach (e.g., the 
prominent role of forensic genetics within a multidisciplinary 
approach) and material obstacles faced (e.g., non- experts 
introducing errors, even causing commingling, in early 
attempts at identification), but also how they differ in signif-
icant ways. In part, the differences stem from the missing or 
unaccounted for themselves and their symbolic weight within 
their respective societies.

In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, efforts to iden-
tify the missing persons of the 1992– 1995 war, victims of vio-
lent conflict whose mortal remains went unrecovered and/or 
unnamed for years after arms were laid to rest, represent a 
form of sociopolitical intervention— an attempt at social 
repair— spearheaded by the International Commission on 
Missing Persons. The majority of the forty thousand individ-
uals missing at the end of the conflict were civilians, and 
thus their recovery and individuated identification were 
explicitly tied to larger discourses of human rights and 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/us/veterans-graves-alexander-nininger.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/us/veterans-graves-alexander-nininger.html


Wagner 141

humanitarianism, transitional justice, and post- conflict social 
reconstruction (Kovras 2017; Rosenblatt 2015; Wagner 2008). 
Ignoring their absence would tacitly condone the violence that 
produced it. Thus, the international community responded 
to the demands of surviving kin and rallied around the work 
of locating the bodies of their missing and developing the 
infrastructure and expertise to identify them— that of two 
entity- level commissions and eventually the Missing Per-
sons Institute, as well as of the International Commission on 
Missing Persons. Piecing back together the remains of vic-
tims of state- sponsored violence on some level became a 
synecdoche for the attempts at stitching back together the 
social fabric of a wartorn society.

The example of the U.S. military’s efforts to recover, 
repatriate, and identify remains of the unaccounted for from 
World War II speaks to a different set of sociopolitical aims. 
Though often labeled a “humanitarian” mission, the project 
of MIA accounting is, at its core, about a state demonstrat-
ing its capacity to care for those who died fighting on its 
behalf.2 The missing are, overwhelmingly, combatants— not 
civilian victims— to whom the United States owes the sin-
gular debt of repatriation and individuated care. It is a tradi-
tion that stretches back to the Civil War. “We still live in the 
world of the dead the Civil War created,” historian Drew Gil-
pin Faust explains. “We take for granted the obligation of 
the state to account for the lives it claims in its service” 
(2008:271). The projects of disentangling the commingled 
remains from Cabanatuan, Tarawa, and Oklahoma fulfill a 
long- delayed obligation to those unrecovered and unnamed 
war dead. At the same time, they do important work for the 
state in terms of contemporary audiences. On the one hand, 
they telegraph to current service members that these are the 
lengths to which the government will go to bring their fallen 
back and care for their remains. On the other, using the most 
sophisticated forensic tools available to parse out the com-
mingled allows the state to insist to the broader American 
public that it spares no resource to honor its fallen, even when 
faced with challenging circumstances of recovery or com-
plicated conditions of remains.

Limitations and Lessons

A final implication discernible in the contributions to this 
special issue is a point that often gets glossed over in con-
temporary popular representations of forensic science— 
namely, that identifying commingled remains is a highly 
complex process that requires significant time, resources, 

2. For example, despite their obvious political overtones, recovery 
efforts in North Korea (currently suspended) have been characterized by 
DPAA as a “humanitarian endeavor,” and MIA accounting for losses in 
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War as part of shared “humanitarian 
goals.”

expertise, and often innovations in methods. No one set of 
cases or one project is the same, though lessons can be 
learned from one to the next, and “no one scientist works in 
a vacuum” (Taylor et al., this issue). There are whole net-
works of actors that make identifications possible— not the 
least of which are families who provide DNA reference 
samples— and scientific knowledge and practice continually 
evolve. Across these articles we hear repeatedly that extensive 
commingling within large- scale populations of unidentified/
unknown dead requires multidisciplinary approaches and 
“multiple lines of evidence” (Scott et al.)— that is, the inter-
play between fields, from a “prioritization strategy” that 
marshals antemortem data (Brown & Lynch) to visual pair- 
matching (LeGarde), inventory procedures using the zona-
tion method (Palmiotto et al.), and the Bayesian approach 
(McCormick). Trying to tackle the puzzle from different 
angles and with multiple, complementary tools is necessary, 
because at the end of the day, as Brown and Lynch argue in 
their technical note on the Oklahoma project, “identifica-
tions become a race against time.” Families of the missing 
and unaccounted for have waited years, if not decades, and 
their own looming mortality adds to the urgency of the task 
at hand.

But sometimes in our impatience for resolution we for-
get two related points that this collection of essays makes 
clear. First, violent conflict sows chaos, even and especially 
on the corporeal level. Bodies and body parts get jumbled. 
Second, errors and limitations in knowledge can compound 
that initial violence. There’s a reason why the bundles recov-
ered in the first casket of the “pre- project” period for Okla-
homa (Brown, this issue) represented a minimum of 25% of 
the ship’s casualties— not because Mildred Trotter did not 
want to identify the remains, but because her ability to do 
so was limited by the state of the field at the time. She and 
her colleagues erred on the side of caution. At the same 
time, as we saw with the World War II processing in the 
1950s, human error can introduce complications that have 
far- reaching consequences, some of which hamstring con-
temporary identification efforts because of their inadver-
tent effects of commingling and even mistakenly identified 
remains.

In rare instances, families of the missing pay yet another 
price of war when, decades after they have laid their loved 
one to rest, they learn that those remains must be re- exhumed 
and re- examined.

***
Taken together, these essays speak to a moment in time, 
both in terms of the state of the field and the social values 
underwriting the enterprise of individuated postmortem 
identification. They are snapshots themselves of this era 
of “necronominalism.” As I read them, I couldn’t help but 
wonder what the scientists of the future— possibly those 
charged with reviewing, maybe even correcting, the work 



142 Conclusion

of contemporary forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, 
odontologists, and geneticists— will say about such efforts 
to address commingled remains. Perhaps they will have 
sharper tools at their disposal; perhaps there won’t be the 
same demand for extracting the individual from the collec-
tive; perhaps future warfare will render even that task 
impossible. Just as the World War II commingled cases pro-
vide “insight into historical forensic anthropological investi-
gations” (Brown, this issue), this collection may offer a road 
map for the decisions taken and strategies honed to disen-
tangle the commingled of wars long past, as well as the sig-
nificant challenges these discrete projects faced.

However they read to future audiences, these essays 
throw into relief the contemporary interplay between foren-
sic science and social values. Whether the nameless are civil-
ian victims of violent conflict or combatants sacrificed on 
behalf of a nation, efforts to identify the commingled are 
predicated on the insistence that names count and bodies 
belong. They belong in some place and to some set of sur-
viving kin. The scientific endeavor to restore them to that 
place and to those kin is an inherently social act. That is to 
say, recovering, reassembling, and naming individuals who 

died as a result of war or violent conflict are themselves a 
form of honoring and remembering.

References

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Faust DG. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American 
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Jasanoff S, ed. States of Knowledge: The Co- Production of Science 
and Social Order. New York: Routledge; 2004.

Kovras I. Grassroots Activism and the Evolution of Transitional 
Justice: The Families of the Disappeared. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press; 2017.

Laqueur TW. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal 
Remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2015.

Piehler KG. Remembering War the American Way. Washington, 
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Rosenblatt R. Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after 
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Wagner S. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the 
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