Skull by skull, team catalogues KR killings

There were approximately 8,985 bodies found at the “Killing Fields” of Choeung Ek, one of nearly 20,000 mass grave sites where victims of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime were left to rot. More than three decades on, the corpses have gone to bone. The skeletons have corroded and fragmented in the tropical climate: femurs separated from hips, fingers from hands, skulls from spines.

For the past two years, archaeologist Voeun Vuthy and his team of investigators have been combing over the bones at Choeung Ek searching for data they could use to deduct the age, sex and manner of death of the victims. For their project, which wrapped up in December, Vuthy’s team examined 6,426 skulls at an on-site lab, the only people ever to do so on such a scale. The fully Khmer team compiled their data in a tome several thousand pages long. Though morbid, the researchers say the book is vitally important to genocide research.

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source: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend