ZO ¨ E CROSSLAND Of Clues and Signs: The Dead Body and Its Evidential Traces ABSTRACT Taking the conflict over the remains of Ned Kelly as a starting point, in this article I trace the various conceptions of the, body as evidence within the intertwined histories of anthropology, criminology, and medicine to explore how anthropological practice brings the dead into being through exhumation and analysis. I outline the popular rhetorical tropes within which evidentiary claims are situated, exploring how the agency of people after death is understood within the framework of present-day forensic anthropological practice and how this is underwritten by a particular heritage of anatomical analysis. [Keywords: archaeology, forensic anthropology, materiality, semiotics of the body] O N DECEMBER 6, 1998, a newspaper article appeared in the Melbourne Herald Sun with the headline “I’ve Got Ned’s Head” (Ballantine 1998). The skull of Ned Kelly had apparently been found, 20 years after its disappearance from the Old Melbourne Gaol. Below the headline was a photograph taken in 1969 (see Figure 1). It showed a cura- tor of the Australian Institute of Anatomy holding a skull in one hand and in the other, seemingly closing its eyes against the horror of its own mortality, Ned Kelly’s death mask. Joining the curator as he looks down at the heads cradled in his arms, one’s gaze falters for a moment at the uncanny image, moving between the heads, unsure which one to settle on: Which is the real Ned Kelly? The case of the missing body parts of the 19th-century Australian bushranger Ned Kelly illustrates the beliefs about the body that are drawn on and remade in the exhumation of human remains. Kelly’s remains provide a starting point for understanding how anthropological practice produces the dead body, illustrating the intertwined histories of crim- inology, anthropology, and medicine and the evidentiary heritage that anthropology carries with it today. The inter- pretation of human remains as evidence is a complex and powerful sign relation, incorporating a range of interpretive possibilities that are rarely disarticulated. In this article, I aim to tease apart some of the different understandings of the body as evidence, exploring the various modes within which the dead body is deployed as evidence and asking after the sources of its evidential authority. The history of Kelly’s remains acts to situate anthropological approaches to human remains in the anatomical practices of the 19th AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 111, Issue 1, pp. 69–80, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C  2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01078.x century. Tracing these practices, I look briefly at the differ- ent ways in which the body has been understood as evi- dence before exploring the rhetorical trope of the “body as evidence” within forensic anthropological practice and in- terrogating the ways in which this is understood to be tied indissolubly to the body’s materiality and object status. Probably most well-known outside Australia from Peter Carey’s novel The True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) and popular films (e.g., Gordon 2003), Kelly is an iconic figure in Australia, where his memory is drawn on, not uncontrover- sially, in narratives of Australian identity and history (Seal 1996). Born in 1854 into a poor Irish family in Victoria, his life was a catalog of gradually escalating trouble with the police and institutionalized authority. He lived an appar- ently lawless and violent bushranger life and was captured by police after a gunfight and siege at Glenrowan, Victoria. After his arrest and trial, he was executed at the Melbourne gaol on November 11, 1880, despite popular petitions for a reprieve (McQuilton 1979:173–175). Today Kelly remains a contentious figure. Some see him as a folk hero and symbol of “the Australian rebellious character,” as the Aus- tralian tourism minister explained in 2001 (Burstin 2001), whereas others view him as a vagabond and a criminal, rejecting his incorporation into mythologies of national identity. 1 The battle to lay claim to Kelly’s remains dates back to the day he was hanged and his body appropriated for dissec- tion and display. After execution his head was shaved and a mould taken for a death mask (as shown in Figure 1). A cast was placed on display in Kreitmayer’s waxworks the next