ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the range of methods currently available for characterizing and fingerprinting soil for use in forensic investigations. It covers traditionally utilized methods as well as more novel techniques. It does not, however, cover areas such as indicators of the presence of cadavers (Forbes, Stuart, and Dent 2002) or means of identification such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) (Ruffell and McKinley 2005) and archaeological recovery (Hunter et al. 2001). Soil forensic analysis has been included in the wider term environmental forensics (which is often associated with contamination issues) (see Murphy and Morrison 2002) and in the term forensic geoscience (Murray and Tedrow 1975, 1992), although this often ignores the organic components found as physical evidence (see Pye and Croft 2004). In this chapter, the mineral, organic, and living components of soil are all considered as part of the wider range of potentially available evidence from soil. The chapter also looks toward future developments with an emphasis on the need to develop quantitative and statistically robust methods to avoid the pitfalls of expert judgment alone.
