Clues discovered about bones UM anthropologist reveals findings about 5 N.H. skeletons

ORONO – A forensic anthropologist at the University of Maine has determined that the bones found in New Hampshire last week belonged to four adults and one juvenile.

Marcella Sorg announced her preliminary findings Thursday in an anthropology lab on campus. She said that it would be several weeks before more detailed information could be released.

“What we’ll do is establish a biological profile – age [at death], gender and a general assessment of their condition,” Sorg has said. “We can tell if they’re Native American or not…. but it’s hard to tell when they [were buried], though, because carbon-14 testing only works [for bones] at least 400 or 500 years old.

“We can’t really tell when they died, unless we find an artifact with the bodies,” she said. “It’s like the ‘Antiques Roadshow’ – we have to see if an artifact can be traced to a particular time period.”

Sorg said Thursday that a piece of wood and a nail found with the remains led a state archaeologist in New Hampshire to assume that the bodies date back to Colonial times and are the bones of European-Americans. The wood and nail probably were part of a coffin made before 1850 and the graves most likely were in a family burial plot.

“It’s not uncommon to come across small unmarked cemeteries or graves on land being developed in previously rural areas,” Sorg said Thursday.

Sorg is one of only 60 forensic anthropologists in North America and the only one working in northern New England. Working in the field since the 1970s, she has testified at numerous murder trials and created biological profiles of the remains of French settlers reburied last year on St. Croix Island.

The New Hampshire skeletal remains were unearthed on July 15 by a backhoe operator working in the back yard of a new home being constructed in a subdivision in Epping, N.H. The town is about 20 miles southwest of Portsmouth.

An archaeological assessment of the property was completed before construction on the Hamilton Heights subdivision began earlier this year, Edna Feighner, an archaeologist with the New Hampshire Division of Historical Research, said Thursday. No record of a cemetery on the property was found. The area has been used as an animal pasture and hayfield for decades, she said.

Sorg said Thursday that finding relatives would be up to New Hampshire officials.

The developer, Porter Holding Inc., has promised to set aside land so that the remains can be reburied at the same site in a small marked graveyard area.

Work on the development is continuing, according to Feighner.