more NaNo-babble

[lesyeuxverts]

Eeep! It's winter already ... I need a hat, and possibly to give in and switch to my winter coat. I'm such a baby. :(

I've discovered a new character in my NaNo ... Anoinette's ex-bf, he's the occultist. I like him rather a lot already.





So, these are the leaves I was talking about. I'm clearly not a botanist but they look rather like the pic of locust leaves that Mord showed me. Are they from a locust? Who ever knew that tree identification was so confusing?

Also, how long does it take for a human body (female) to decompose? I assume it makes a difference if she had been buried in a coffin/buried in the earth/left in the river (where she drowned)? ...I know it's a really weird question, and I do not need gruesome details, just a general time scale, i.e. years/decades/centuries.



*snuggles you all, because y'all are fabulous*

Comments

Re: On Decomposition

[r_grayjoy.insanejournal.com]

Depends upon the quality of the coffin and the amount of moisture in the ground. How well-off was this person? Would they have been buried in what amounted to a top-of-the-line coffin in that time, or your standard, cheap wooden box? Is it a wet season or a dry season?

In a standard wooden box with a fair amount of moisture, I'd say a few weeks; in a nicer coffin, it could probably take several months.

Non-fleshy things will last longer, but their decomposition is going to be affected by the same factors. After a few months, you'd likely still be able to find bones, hair, clothes... certainly glass or metal items... probably wood items... maybe paper items, depending.

To give you an idea -- I was involved with a historical archaeology project at this time last year. Our artefacts went as far back as the 1920s or so. We found a lot of glass, of course. Any paper that would have been on the glass was long gone. There was a lot of metal, although it was VERY rusted, some of it to the point that it crumbled to nothing if you tried to move it. There were a few animal bones, but only very dense ones remaining. In some of the upper layers (say, around the 40s or 50s) we found a few tiny scraps of fabric. There was some wood, but it was soaked and fragile and fragmented.