For almost five years, Dr. Maclennan has also taught three-week-long programs on forensic jewelry at the Edinburgh College of Art, part of the University of Edinburgh, where she is a senior lecturer in jewelry and silver smithing. (She also just completed a Diploma in Diamonds and Diamond Grading from the Gemological Institute of America branch in London.)
Aditi Ranganathan, 22, a final-year student in textile design, attended two of the programs early in her studies. “I still talk about it to this day because I think it shows that as creatives we can exist in lots of different spaces,” she said. “A lot of people, when they think jeweler, they think, ‘Oh, wedding rings,’ but the fact Maria is able to use her craft to help people is something really cool.”
The primary tools of victim identification are DNA, fingerprints and dental records, Dr. Maclennan says. And while jewelry alone is not enough to make a scientific forensic identification, it does have a useful place as what she calls a “secondary identifier.”
“Jewelry is robust,” she said. “It can survive a lot of trauma, and sadly it can outlast the human body.”
In addition to obvious connections such as names or dates engraved on wedding rings, “there could be a physical clue or characteristic on the jewelry that tells us when it was made or purchased, or who it was made by or who it was purchased by,” she said. (In Britain, for example, some jewelry is stamped by a government assay office with icons called hallmarks, which indicate details such as the type of metal, the date and the maker’s mark.)
She also noted that jewelry sometimes could be a repository for DNA, pulling off her own chunky silver-ring set with a large citrine and showing it to a visitor. “If you look through the stone from the front, you can see all kinds of gunk on the back,” she said. “The jewelry industry is always telling us to clean our jewelry, but from a forensic perspective, if we don’t, it can be a very good vessel for DNA.”
