October 10, 2003 - Today's Other News Items

Tune in for Donner Bone Chip Tale

The University of Oregon's Materials Science Institute and Neuroscience Institute played key roles in revealing the story behind bone fragments found in August that are presumed to date from the winter of 1846-47 at a Donner Party camp site.

With the help of the Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), high-magnification images were made and analyzed to help determine the nature of the evidence. Tune in 7 p.m. Oct. 11 on the Discovery Channel's new "Unsolved History: The Donner Party" for a look at the results and to find out what really happened during one of the American West's most compelling dramas.

Principal investigator Julie Schablitsky, associated with UO's Museum of Natural History, will discuss the dig at a free lecture, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., Oct. 10, room 175 Knight Law Center. Her topic is "Tracking Them Down: Using DNA to Answer Elusive Archaeological Questions."

The Donner Party, consisting of 81 people in 20 wagons, left Illinois for California to seek a better life but detoured straight into a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Surviving members of the group were rescued in the spring of 1847 but witnesses reported seeing fragments of butchered human bones and other human remains that suggested that the starving travelers had resorted to cannibalism.

The Discovery TV crew spent two days filming on campus last month, according to JoAn Hudson, director of the microimaging group. She runs the electron microscopy facility that is part of The Center for Advanced Materials Characterization in Oregon (CAMCOR). In addition to serving the campus community, the state-of-the-art instruments in CAMCOR are available to outside researchers such as Shannon Novak, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Utah who conducted the bone fragment research here on behalf of Discovery, which sponsored the excavation of the Donner site.