Welcome back to the MSUFAL Blog Series!
This week, two of our lab members, Amber Plemons and Rhian Dunn, sat down with Dr. Norm Sauer, a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and the 2007 recipient of the T. Dale Stewart Award for Lifetime Achievement in Forensic Anthropology. In addition to his position as a faculty member, Dr. Sauer was previously one of the Directors of the MSUFAL, as well as the Secretary and Chair of the Anthropology Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
Instead of a more traditional blog post, we decided to hold a podcast style interview with Dr. Sauer. Listen as we ask Dr. Sauer a series of questions about his time at MSU and his experiences as a forensic anthropologist. And thank you so much to Dr. Sauer for taking the time to participate in our blog series!
A transcript of the interview is provided below:
[Amber] We’re rolling.
[Amber] So I’ll just do a quick introduction of myself.
My name is Amber Plemons and I’m a PhD student at MSU.
And Rhian is also a PhD student at MSU, and we’re both working with Dr. Joe Hefner.
And we’re sitting with Norm Sauer, who is a very important part of our history at MSU.
And we’re just going to kind of hope to hear some good stories from Dr. Sauer and hear about his time as a forensic anthropologist. We just want to say thank you for sitting down with us, because it’s a very big honor for us to sit with you.
[Dr. Sauer] Well, obviously, it’s my pleasure.
[Amber] Thank you. So, we’ll just kind of ask you some questions and roll from there, and you can just tell some stories.
[Dr. Sauer] Sure. Well, I’ll do what I can.
00:00:42
[Amber] So, we know that now you’re retired. So, we just wanted to start off asking how you’re enjoying your retirement, and if you’ve found any new hobbies, and do you miss being an anthropologist?
[Dr. Sauer] I’m enjoying retirement immensely. One of the nice things about being a university faculty member, is you have summers to rehearse your entire life for retirement. So I’ve been pretty good at that.
I really haven’t taken up new hobbies as much I have expanded on things I was doing for
many, many years. When I retired, I started fishing a lot more. But one of the things that my students gave me for retirement was a kit for making work, not a kit, the materials to make a fishing rod. And so now I make fishing rods. I make them for friends and myself.
I have a lot of fishing rods. And tie flying and I fish as much as I can. I really enjoy it.
I’ve expanded my photography hobby. I just, in last six months, bought a new camera and a couple of highfalutin lenses. And I’m having a lot of fun with that too.
And I still golf and hunt now and then, and so yeah, I’m not, I’m not sitting around the house a lot. And I’m enjoying it.
[Amber] That’s nice. It sounds like you spend a lot of time outside.
[Dr. Sauer] I do. I do. It’s important, it’s important for our whole family actually.
[Amber] That’s awesome.
[Dr. Sauer] And I poke around in anthropology a little bit. I do a few cases a year from around the country. I am also a consultant with DPAA. So in pre, and hopefully post COVID times, I get a trip or two each year out to Hawaii or Omaha and interact with some really nice people through that. And I like that. That’s really stimulating work.
[Amber] That’s really nice. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of people, when they go into retirement, this is such their passion that they kind of continue to keep working afterwards. It sounds like you’re kind of doing the same.
[Dr. Sauer] You know, through my career, I’ve always felt that…this is a little philosophical…that life balance is important. While I did work as an anthropologist, I spent a lot of time doing it. I didn’t give up family and outdoors and hobbies and things like that either.
00:03:16
[Rhian] So what got you interested in forensic anthropology?
[Dr. Sauer] Forensic anthropology really started while I was in graduate school. And back in the early seventies, Dr. Phenice, my major professor and mentor, and I occasionally, well, he got asked by
medical examiners and, and law enforcement people to identify bones. We would do that because he knew something about the skeleton.
I was studying to be a bioarchaeologist and I didn’t know anything about forensic anthropology. And I remember the first, first case I can remember working on with him was a, was a house fire and multiple people were killed. And they found a leg in the remains and wanted to know if we could help identify which of the people it was.
And so we x-rayed it and could see that the epiphysis on the proximal end of the tibia had not fused yet. So, we knew that it was likely to be a teenager. And, in fact, only one of the people killed in the fire was a teenager. So by the process of elimination, we considered that we had most likely identified
that person. But that’s the first case I can remember.
And through the seventies, cases would trickle in now and then and I got involved in it. And I almost liked doing them and compared to bioarchaeology, I like the fact that you could start a case on a Monday and be done with it maybe later on that day, or maybe in a few days. At most, a couple of weeks. You know, you start a project in bioarcheology, and you do the research, and you do the writing, and you do the publication, and you, or you submit it, and then resubmit it. You know, you are really talking about things that don’t pay off for a long time.
But the other thing about anthropology, forensic anthropology, to me, that’s important is that I never had to ask if I was doing anything important for society. And that always troubled me a little bit with
bioarchaeology. And I know it’s very important academically. You get to learn about our past and there’s lots of reasons for it. But there was a more of a blue collar immediacy with forensic anthropology that appealed to me. So, so both do. Both appeal to me, but that was what it was about anthropology.
00:05:51
So I, it was probably fortunate for me, but my development as a forensic anthropologist, by doing a few cases in the seventies, and more in the eighties, and more in the nineties, pretty much paralleled the field of forensic anthropology.
Because in the seventies is when the physical anthropology section of the Academy of Forensic sciences I think got started and I was asked to join. And I, of course I did that. And then in the late seventies, I was asked if I would be interested in being board-certified. And so I was in probably the second wave of anthropologists who got board-certified.
What’s my number?
My number is 23 or something like that.
Better not quote me.
Look it up!
I don’t know what it is.
But there weren’t very many of us at the time.
And so in the ensuing decades, the field of forensic anthropology grew and I grew as a forensic anthropologist. It wasn’t anything intentional starting out. Forensic anthropology sort of found me.
00:06:57
[Amber] And you wrote some really important pieces in our field. So just, off of that, what were some of your major research interests while you were a forensic anthropologist and did you have any favorite projects that you worked on?
[Dr. Sauer] So there’s no question that I’ve been linked with the concept of race and, and that’s something that has gone, lasted throughout my career. And I’ve enjoyed that a lot and probably got, frankly, the most attention through those papers and other things. But there were some papers that I like that I wrote that were sort of more conceptual papers on how to, how to deal with time since death.
I did a paper one time about the anthropologist’s role in death investigation. And, and that was a fun paper to write. That was when I argued that anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, never or rarely ever come up with a cause of death. But we certainly can help identify manner of death or contribute to the determination of manner of death.
And it was, it was just completely a conceptual thought player, paper, but it got published by the academy, the Journal Forensic Sciences. And, so, I like that. That was kind of a special paper. You know and then a lot of the other papers that I wrote are kind of scattered around different topics.
[Amber] So, I’d be interested in hearing the story of the famous sailor photo.
[Dr. Sauer] Yeah, that was this high school teacher, I think he was from New York, was writing this book about the sailor, and he had a theory about who that sailor was. And it’s not the person who was the front runner who had claimed he was the kissing sailor. And I don’t remember their names. One of the ones, the one that I favored, died a couple of years ago. And so that kind of reared its head again in the media.
But he asked me if I would evaluate his candidate and then evaluate the other person to see who was most likely to be the kissing sailor. We had great images of kissing sailor, sailor. We had several of them from different angles. And we had a couple of pictures from both of the candidates. And working with a couple of graduate students, we were able to conclude that it was more, much more likely to be the candidate he thought it was than the person who had gained so much attention about it over the years. And so, our work was a chapter in his book, and it was, it was, it was a fun one to work on.
[Amber] That ‘s really cool.
[Dr. Sauer] Yeah.
00:9:50
[Rhian] Who were your mentors when you were a graduate student?
[Dr. Sauer] I have two mentors that were, that were most important in my life. One was in my undergraduate professor. I went to one of the State University of New York schools called Geneseo. It was a teaching school. I intended to be a middle school or high school teacher when I went to college.
And I was a math major only because I took a math course as a freshman and the professor said, you know, you ought to be a math major. Nobody had ever said anything that nice to me before. And so I became a math major and I really didn’t like it. And it wasn’t very successful at it. But it’s what he said I should be.
And then, wait, not until I was a junior, I took a course in general anthropology and was like, holy smokes, you mean, you can do this for a living? And I really liked it. And I became the professor’s lab assistant. And he and I turned out to be good friends. He’s the godfather of my son and our families became pretty close. But he absolutely was totally responsible for getting me into anthropology. And without him, I would not have known anything about, anything about anthropology.
And then I came to Michigan State specifically to study cultural anthropology, because that’s mainly what I learned as an undergraduate. And I took two courses as a, as my first year at state. One was sociocultural anthropology and the other one was physical anthropology and archaeology. And I really didn’t like the sociocultural course. I had no interest in that and I thought what did I get myself into?
But there was something that was really intriguing to me about the physical anthropologist that I was studying with and that was Dr. Phenice. And I remember sometime during that term I walked into his office and sat down and said, I think I want to be a physical anthropologist. He said, well, how much experience do you have? How much science have you had? And I said, really, not very much. And I said, but I had an osteology course, so I know that.
So he kind of smiled, and reached into his desk, and he handed me a vertebra. And he said, talk to me about that a little bit. And I looked at it and I said, I think it’s human. Handed it to him and he said, Okay, well, you probably have a little work to do.
But anyway, from then on I became his student. I think I was, I was his only PhD student. But he taught me a lot. He taught me a lot about thinking critically, questioning things, and thinking outside of the box as they say these days.
So Dr. Phenice and the undergraduate person was Dr. Wendell Rhodes. Those were my main peeps starting out.
00:12:47
[Amber] So, how did you handle the transition as, transferring from a student at MSU to a professor?
[Dr. Sauer] You know, that was a little bit tricky. I think that, that for the first, you know, first five or 10 years, there were faculty who just didn’t see me as their peer. So faculty meetings weren’t a lot of fun. I was afraid to say anything. And it was probably because most of them got replaced by attrition and new people were hired that, you know, I sort of felt completely welcomed as a faculty member.
But the other flip, the flip side of that was it was funny around students too. But there were a couple of instances where my fellow student, I joined the committee, the graduate committee, of one of my fellow students, or a couple of them and that was kind of interesting. But they came around.
So. I tried not to be a jerk about being a faculty member when they were still students. I don’t know how well I did with that. Probably not very well.
[Amber] That seems like a very tricky situation.
[Dr. Sauer] It was. It was. But it worked out.
00:14:01
[Rhian] Can you tell us a little bit about how the MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab kind of got started?
[Dr. Sauer] Yeah, I can tell you a little bit about that, I guess.
For the first 20 years of my career at MSU, including when, when I got there, and it was Dr. Phenice’s, lab too. It was in the bottom floor of an administrative building, administration building on campus. I don’t know what the building was. It was just a conglomeration of stuff. And I don’t know how we ever got in that floor.
We had like two big rooms then, little office rooms behind it, or attached to it. But the main lab was this long sort of hallway room with one sink. And the sink was, honestly, it had to be 20 inches wide and 20 inches deep or something. And, and there were shelving with boxes of bones all over the place. And to use the sink you had to bend your head down and get below one of the shelves and tuck it in there.
And that was the only source of water we had in the lab.
So, if you can imagine what you folks have with your fancy hood and all those things up and in the fourth floor of Fee Hall, we had this little sink. Which meant that we couldn’t do much forensic anthropology at, at MSU.
So, and by the time we got the new lab, the lab that’s close to what you have now, any cases that I did I did, I did in the morgue and I had a good relationship with the local forensic pathologist. And if I got a call on a case that wasn’t through him, he was very gracious and said sure have them bring the remains to the lab and you can, or the morgue, and you can work in there. And so that allowed me to do the kind, I couldn’t bring a body. I couldn’t, you know, all I could bring into the lab were dry bones. We didn’t even have good fans in those days, much less a hood. So. So that was start of it.
And then in the mid-nineties, I got invited to move to Fee Hall. And the lab started off in one room and, and it was much nicer than the one that I had. And they built these nice shelves for me which still there, that are still there, that we put some of the collections we had.
And then for some reason they wanted that room, so they moved us. When they moved us, they said, we’ll sweeten the pot. We’ll give you twice the space. So we moved. In fact, one time we went up to the fifth floor, and we were up there. I think we moved about three or four times and each time they just about doubled our space.
So now that we have that sort of bioarchaeology lab down at the end of the hall, the big office suite, and then the two rooms, the Forensic Anthropology Lab in the other direction that you’re well familiar with. You know, we ended up with some pretty good space. That really helped us do a lot of things that we couldn’t do before.
But one of the other important aspects of having a lab moved to Fee Hall was it, it was a medical school. So that put us right, right in the middle of osteopathic medicine, we were close to the anatomy lab. And I don’t know if you’ve both taken anatomy yet or you will at MSU, but you know that many of our students over the years have ended up working in the lab as assistants, teaching medical students anatomy, and some of them have found careers in anatomy through that.
So, so moving to a facility that was, or building, that was accustomed to having dead things in it really was so much more appropriate. And instead of an administrative building, we’re in a medical, medical school building and it, and that really helped a lot. And they got good space.
And then when Dr. Fenton came in the mid-nineties, that really multiplied our potential in terms of two forensic anthropologists. But it also brought a different perspective, which was great. And together I think we, I think we clicked pretty well both in terms of what we did, and the kind of work we did and the amount of work we did.
One of the things have worked out for us is we ended up having a really good relationship with the people around us. The pathologists, the forensic scientists, the police, the state police. And it all helped to have people come our way when they needed forensic anthropology. Even when they didn’t, even when they didn’t know it.
00:19:50
[Amber] Was it sort of a slow start with those relationships? Did you kind of start with one medical examiner and branch out or how did that work?
[Dr. Sauer] Yeah, of course. I mean those people who have, like a lot of people, they tend to be very possessive about their turf and their cases. So yeah, it was a slow start, but we did it for a long time. If you do anything for a long time, even if it’s slow, it gets a certain amount of bulk. I think by the time, when I left, I think we were doing about a 100 cases a year.
[Amber] You all have really fostered the relationship with the anatomy department too, because we’ve been able to work with them. And we actually did, we did a lot of analyses on some of the skeletons that they had for study in their labs and found that some of them were Native American and they’re working into repatriate those. So that was really interesting.
[Dr. Sauer] Oh, I didn’t know that! That’s great. Good.
[Amber] Yeah. And also, I’m sure you know that we’re moving out of Fee now over to Giltner.
[Dr. Sauer] I heard that! How is that progressing?
[Amber] It’s great. We’re supposed to be able to move this semester and we’re getting an even bigger sink. And a walk-in cooler. So we are moving up!
[Dr. Sauer] The evolution of the Forensic Anthropology Lab sinks at Michigan State University.
[Amber] Exactly.
[Dr. Sauer] Great.
00:20:13
[Rhian] Do you have any favorite memories of working in the lab or your time at MSU?
[Dr. Sauer] It’s really hard to point to particular cases. There are a lot of them that I just found so interesting, and it was so good to be able to, to help.
I met Joe. I think I’d met him once before. He would know. I think we’ve talked about this. But after 9/11, that was a case, I guess you’d call it. That made a lot of impact on the way that I look at things, and look back and things. I mean, at four o’clock in the morning on 9/12, I got in my car and headed to Chicago. So we could fly to, because nobody was flying, we flew in military planes.
I was part of D-MORT at that time. And I spent a few weeks or a few days in New York and then went up the Pennsylvania to work. That’s where I worked with Joe, Dennis Dirkmaat, and Laura Fulginiti, and some others working on the United flight victims.
So, some of the things that come to mind when you ask a question about memories is, are, I think one of the more gratifying things that I did at MSU in 1986 was to start a study abroad program. And Amber knows that well. And that was a five-week program as it continues to be.
It was initially in London and Cambridge, and then we moved it to Bournemouth because Cambridge changed their labs and suggested we go somewhere else. So we did. And that’s worked out great.
But, but spending five weeks for all those years with such wonderful students and colleagues was, was really highlight of my career. I’ve, I’ve always liked that a lot.
[Amber] I can definitely say going and being a part of the study abroad, has been one of my favorite memories at MSU so far too.
[Dr. Sauer] Oh, that’s cool. You know, and I think of all the students who’ve done such great stuff that were veterans, not veterans, but went on that program. And there are people who, all over the country, who are doing forensic anthropology now that started off by going on that study abroad program. So that was, that was really cool.
You know, I also really liked, a few years ago I started working as a consultant with JPAC, which is now DPAA. And I was sort of a visiting scholar for a couple of trips and then got involved as one of the consultants. There’s a group of sort of senior scientists that go out and help people out. And not only, you know, it’s nice to go to Hawaii, but it’s also really challenging, significant work and that’s been sustaining. I still do casework, four or five cases a year, which is perfect. For me.
00:23:16
[Amber] Do you have any advice for current students interested in pursuing forensic anthropology?
[Dr. Sauer] I do. The first thing I’m gonna say, you’re gonna laugh about it. And that is get A’s. It’s so competitive.
[Amber] It is.
[Dr. Sauer] It’s just the kind of field. And if you’re going to take, if you’re going to pursue a career in anthropology, a career in anthropology, you can’t do anything with it, in forensic anthropology, you can’t do anything with it with a bachelor’s degree. A master’s degree is nice. But a PhD is really, should be your target.
You know, if you’re going to do that, you gotta get serious about it as an undergraduate, because the better you perform, doesn’t mean that you’re smarter or not as smart as somebody else. The better you perform, the better, the more options you’re going to have for schools and the better school you’re going to get into.
[Amber] And it gets more competitive every year.
[Dr. Sauer] I’m sure. And that’s great!
Obviously, major in anthropology if you can, because some schools require that. Take all the science you can because it is a hard science field.
But be patient. Don’t think you’re going to jump right into doing forensic anthropology cases as soon as you take an anthropology course.
00:24:27
[Rhian] If you hadn’t gone into anthropology, forensic anthropology, would you have stuck with bioarchaeology or is there anything else you would have pursued?
[Dr. Sauer] Well, that’s a good question. Yeah, I probably would have stuck with bioarchaeology. I don’t, you know, you can’t go back and say that would’ve been fine. I would’ve had a great, I would’ve loved that. I don’t know. I had some great bioarchaeological experiences.
I think that it’s pretty clear, however, that if I have a reputation outside of MSU, it’s mainly forensic anthropology, because I’ve published more in that field. But I had some good, I’ve spent a few years, over a few years, that were over a span of time on a project in Costa Rica that I liked very much. I loved being down there. And it was interesting.
But I thought you’re going to say if you didn’t, weren’t going to be an anthropologist, what, what would you have done as a career? I’m going to have to reread that question.
But so that makes me think and I’ve thought about this a lot is when I went to graduate school, I didn’t have a terribly stellar undergraduate record. And I was tending bar at a country club in upstate New York and I really liked it. You know, I was head daytime bartender shooting for that head nighttime bartender spot when I got a letter saying that I had been accepted at MSU.
Had I not got into MSU, I might have gone into teaching Special Ed. I had taught Special Ed for a year when I got out of undergraduate school, because I found out there was an opening and was able to convince the administrators and that school district that I could do it and I liked it.
00:26:13
[Amber] Was there anything else that you want to talk about? Any other stories or any other little notes to add?
[Dr. Sauer] You know, the other thing that I enjoyed was I got involved with the Academy of Forensic Sciences. I kind of enjoyed the, those roles, being on the board of directors, even, even serving as Vice President for year.
But I, as many of us had, had some roles in the academy section. I served on the American Board of
Forensic Anthropology for 12 years and most of that time I was treasurer. I think because I could subtract. I don’t know. So that’s a, that’s a part of my career that I like.
You know what else I like and I, and we haven’t mentioned, is another thing that I started back in the 80s, early 90s was doing training sessions. They involved week-long sessions where we had mock burials and guest lectures and entomology and archaeology and all aspects of forensic anthropology. We had great guests come in and we did them for the FBI, for the state police, for sheriff’s agencies, and groups of sheriff’s agencies.
We even did a couple of schools out in Wisconsin for their, their whatever their MSP is, some other, some other name. And those weeks were always great because I really got to know those people.
And that’s the kind of thing that helped expand our, our visibility and our case work. And not only number of cases that we do but the kinds of cases that we do. Because a lot of times people have no idea how a forensic anthropologist could help them in a particular scenario and this kind of opened their eyes to some of that stuff.
Believe me, many, in the old days, people thought, well, anthropologists tell you whether they’re human or non-human bone. With the idea that you could go into a lab and work on a fire victim or some person who was a victim of some awful mass trauma and help understand that and actually teach the Medical Examiner about some of those things was surprising to them.
One of the areas that I’ve worked on quite a bit actually is image comparisons. And either, more often excluding or trying to exclude, but trying to identify and exclude people based upon surveillance images, computer images. And those were homicides, robberies, a few pornography cases.
And people don’t believe that unless you get a chance to tell him that you can do that stuff. And most of the referrals that I get now, I just got a call last week from a defense attorney in upstate New York. And they were trying to, she’s defending somebody who is identified in a surveillance video. Just word of mouth. She knew somebody that had done a similar case that I had worked with. And so you really, part of those training programs, is you explaining the scope of things you can do.
And I, back to your question, enjoyed working on those and working with those people. And also, you know, it was, it was so much fun to do those things with students. And that really is one of my favorite, one of the favorite parts of my career was working with students. I like that.
[Amber] I will say those training sessions are definitely a lot of good experience for the students too.
[Dr. Sauer] Yeah, I agree.
[Amber] You get teaching experience and things like that. So those are actually a lot of fun.
[Dr. Sauer] And did you bury-
[Amber] We did.
[Dr. Sauer] bury plastic skeletons? Isn’t that a great day?
[Amber] It is. It was very cold. I started snowing.
[Dr. Sauer] Oh yeah, I’ve been there.
[Amber] But it was a lot of fun.
[Dr. Sauer] I remember one of the trips we made out to Wisconsin, we told them to bury some animals, but do it in the fall so that in the spring when we went out there, they’d be decomposed. Well, they thought they’d be creative and put clothes on them. And well that, kind of slowed down the decomposition.
And when we went out there in the fall, two things happened. One, it rained and rained and rained, so the water table was up to where the burials were. And two, they weren’t really ready yet, to be excavated, so it was way more disgusting than it had to be.
[Amber] It builds character.
[Dr. Sauer] That’s well put.
[Amber] That’s really great. Yeah, it seems like you have a pattern of things you enjoy and that’s service so that really speaks to why you are such a great mentor to so many people.
[Dr. Sauer] Well, thank you for saying that, but I did, I did like it. I do like it. Yeah. I mean, what, what job could be better than spending it with students.
I think about what a great career that was. And I think to me that’s the most important part of it. I like to teach. So. Still do.
[Amber] Thank you so much. We really appreciate you talking with us.
[Dr. Sauer] It was my pleasure. I enjoyed it too. And I hope it was helpful.
[Rhian] Yes, it was really interesting to see your perspective and we really loved listening to the stories as well.
Leave a Reply