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A body farm is a research facility where decomposition of humans and animals can be studied in a variety of settings.
Research facilities designed to study human decomposition, body farms leave corpses out to decay so that scientists can analyze the gruesome results.
The Facility is also known as “The Body Farm,” a name inspired by Bass and his work and popularised by crime author Patricia Cornwell in a novel of the same name.
It was actually the body of the Confederate soldier, Colonel William Shy, who’d been dead for over a century. The remains were so well preserved because they’d been embalmed and buried in an airtight coffin.
A “body farm” is a specialized outdoor research facility where human decomposition is studied under various conditions. Formally known as human decomposition or forensic anthropology research facilities, their purpose is to observe and document changes a human body undergoes after death.
Founded by Dr. William Bass, the Center includes two departments: a state-of-the-art scientific research facility, and an outdoor research site known as the Body Farm. Here, human remains lay openly exposed to the elements.
The name "body farm" came roughly 20 years later from a crime thriller by Patricia Cornwell. The Body Farm, which came out in 1995, describes an anthropological research facility that studies the decomposition of bodies.
The original body farm is the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility located a few miles from downtown on Alcoa Highway in Knoxville, Tennessee, behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center.
There are eight decomposition research facilities in the United States, all located at universities (see below). These research facilities have been deemed "body farms" due to the nature of the decomposition research they perform.
Body farms are research facilities that study human decomposition in various environments and contexts. The first facility was opened in 1981 by Dr. William M. Bass after realizing the serious lack of data on human corpse decomposition (Pokines et al., 2022).