Historical Grave Detection - Grand Junction, Colorado

Located in the Grand Junction area, this course will help you understand what it means to use dogs to work with archaeologists who survey historic graves  - Archaeological Human Remains Detection Dogs, AHRDD.

We will gain an appreciation of the archaeological approach to understanding the world, and how we should work our dogs to be the most effective. We will learn how we can support the overall project and provide useful information by using the dog as an asset and part of the overall problem solving process. We will review researching activities prior to fieldwork, and then learn how to incorporate fieldwork into a report.

Additionally we will review the multi-disciplinary approach - archaeology, anthropology, chemistry and applied animal behavior among others - and bring it all together with several days of actual field work. To this end we will learn how mapping and other research sites support our results, review and understand how dogs learn and how to develop adequate training plans. We will also review odor profiles as they relate to stages of decomp and stages of scavenging in addition to providing an introduction to bone identification, human vs non-human and field photography.

We will start this Course at the Forensic Investigation Research Station (FIRS) Classroom in Whitewater. FIRS, at Colorado Mesa University is a research, teaching and service center that focuses on forensic taphonomy and related fields.