I seldom have nightmares. When I do, they are usually flitting images of the everyday things I see on the job: crushed and perforated skulls, lopped-off limbs and severed heads, roasted and dissolving corpses, hanks of human hair and heaps of white bones all in a day's work at my office, the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. Recently I dreamed I was in a faraway country, trying on shoes, and the leather in the shoes was so improperly prepared that the laces and uppers were crawling with maggots.  But there was a simple, ordinary explanation for this phantasm:  one of my graduate students was raising maggots as part of a research project.

I have gazed on the face of death innumerable time, witnessed it in all its grim manifestations.  Death has no power to freeze my heart, jangle my nerves or sway my reason.  Death to me is no terror of the night but a daylit companion, a familiar condition, a process obedient to scientific laws and answerable to scientific inquiry.

For me, every day is Halloween.  When you think of all the horror movies you have seen in your entire life, you are visualizing only a dim, dull fraction of what I have seen in actual fact.  Our laboratory is primarily devoted to teaching physical anthropology to graduate students at the University of Florida, and is part of the Florida Museum of Natural History.  Yet, thanks to the wording of the 1917 law establishing the museum, we often find ourselves investigating wrongful death, attempting to dispel the shadows surrounding murder and suicide.  All too often in the past, under the o...