Ambika Flavel, BSc (Hons), MSc is an osteoarchaeologist who has worked as an archaeologist, anthropologist and forensic consultant, primarily in locating and excavating clandestine graves, and in the analysis of human remains in both domestic and international contexts.
She began her career in Bosnia-Herzegovina excavating mass graves pertaining to the Srebrenica massacre for the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She then went on to join the Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) and then the Equipo de Exhumaciones de la Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHAG) where she spent the next few years exhuming and analysing human remains and associated evidence from the era of the Dictator Rios Montt.
Ambika has undertaken multiple missions to Iraq, firstly for Inforce the on behalf of the Coalitional Provisional Authority to advise on the location and exhumation of war graves and subsequently in the mass grave investigations for the Regimes Crime Liaison Office (RCLO) analysing and repatriating human remains for the Anfal trial. She spent a season exhuming and analysing remains from clandestine graves from the Franco era in Spain for the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH, Cuenca). Fieldwork experience also includes exhuming a mass grave for Batavia victims off the coast of Western Australia, exhumation and analysis of WW1 mass graves in France, and consultancy work for the Dorset police. Ambika has also provided International capacity building and training in field and laboratory techniques to university students, professionals and law enforcement agencies. She co-authored and co-edited The Scientific Investigation of Mass Graves, published in 2008.
