Abstract Police in the UK received information that a person had been reported as missing. Despite a diligent search and investigation, the person was not found. Several years later police received intelligence giving the location of a grave believed to contain the remains of the person previously reported as missing and now believed to be a victim of homicide. This new information suggested the missing person had been murdered and their remains were buried in a shallow, unmarked grave. Following a systematic search, the murder victim's body was found at a shallow depth, less than 1 m. Following the forensic recovery of the body, soil samples were collected at, beneath the floor of the grave, along the strike of the grave, downslope and upslope. Analysis of the soil samples showed elevated levels of putrescine, at nearly 150 ppb in the soils beneath, downslope and for several metres upslope from the body at localities where detector dogs had showed an ‘interest’ before the grave was discovered. The mineralogical analysis, using integrated automated mineralogy and petrology detected the presence of diagenetic calcite in the soil profile beneath the grave. Additionally, the organic analysis detected the presence of elevated stanols at the grave and down slope.

Abstract The last major event that shaped the Canadian Shield, orogeny during the mid- to late Mesoproterozoic, left its imprint as a broad swath of highly deformed and metamorphosed rocks extending 2000 km from the Atlantic coast of southern Labrador to Lake Huron. The northwest margin of the resulting Grenville Province, referred to as the Grenville Front, is a zone of southeasterly dipping thrust faulting and mylonitization that truncates the various structural trends characterizing the adjacent, older shield provinces. Some 400–500 km farther southeast, the exhumed Grenville Province is overlain by lower Paleozoic platformal sedimentary rocks, but crystalline rocks bearing the imprint of Grenvillian orogenic events appear again in tectonic windows within the Appalachian Orogen of Maritime Canada and the eastern United States. Beyond its exposure in the Canadian Shield, the Grenville Orogen extends southwestward to Texas and Mexico; it is also recognized in inliers in the Caledonides of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Norway, southeast of which it is represented by the Sveconorwegian Province of southern Norway and Sweden (Fig. 3.1). Recent reconstructions of supercontinent assembly in the early Neoproterozoic (e.g. Dalziel, 1991; Moores, 1991; Hoffman, 1991; Borg and DePaolo, 1994) show a further continuation of this belt from central America through Antarctica and eastern India to Australia. The widely used term “Grenvillian Orogeny” embraces a range of tectonic events beginning with an early accretionary stage between ca. 1.3 and 1.2 Ga, and ending with uplift and exhumation shortly after 1.0 Ga. Arguing that the construction of orogens involves more than