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

On Decomposition

[r_grayjoy.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, it depends upon the manner of burial, and particularly, the type of environment.

In a river? Probably a matter of days -- fish and critters would munch away all the moist bits rather quickly.

In a really wet environment? Probably also a matter of days. The bones would take a little longer, but would still degrade pretty quickly. (There's a reason we don't find fossils in tropical environments...)

In a modern coffin/cemetery? Years. Centuries. Those things are sealed so tight, the bodies are prone to great preservation and mummification, even.

Give me more specific details about the type of burial and the environment, and to what extent you mean when you say "decompose", and I can probably give you a more precise answer.

Re: On Decomposition

[lesyeuxverts.insanejournal.com]

Ah ha, I should have known to ask you. Silly me. :)

By "decompose," I mean ... the fleshy bits gone, or at least mostly gone. The burial ... probably not a modern coffin, but a coffin a couple of centuries ago, I guess. I'm still not really clear on what time period it was, tbh. Somewhere in Europe, so not too tropical.

Would clothes/paper/perishable non-fleshy things survive?

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.