ABSTRACT
The recovery of evidence of clothing and associated materials on buried bodies is essential to both forensic and archaeological investigations. In criminal cases clothing will frequently be intact, but may be disturbed by taphonomic processes. Recent experimental work has been conducted on pig cadavers to assess the effect of maggot masses in disturbing the position of clothing; such disturbance could be confused with evidence of sexual assault (Komar and Beattie, 1998). The correct identification of dress items can aid in the correlation of clothing with details in missing persons files. In the case of bodies recovered from war zones the presence of distinctive clothing or equipment can be used to distinguish between military personnel and civilians, or in the case of unmarked battlefield graves between the deceased from different armies or units. The specifications of military clothing very often require durability under taxing conditions, often with the selection of dyes and special finishes to resist biodeterioration. War zone graves may be investigated after longer time intervals than many forensic cases, and for this reason it is important to understand the resistance to biodeterioration of military dress under different soil conditions over many decades. In the last few years bodies have been exhumed and identifications attempted from graves associated with every major conflict of the 20th century, including World War I.
