Forensic science has seen several watershed concepts that have led to its current operational state. The first was in 529, when Emperor Justinian approved the Codex Constitutionum, an extensive reconfiguration of old and new Roman law. In it, doctors were acknowledged as witnesses who could provide judgments based on this expertise and not only on eyewitness testimony; today, this privilege is called being an expert witness. The second was in 1883, when Hans Gross published arguably the first forensic textbook, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (Handbook for Examining Magistrates as a System of Criminalistics). Gross recognized that it was the crime scene and not the body that was of paramount importance in a criminal investigation. His book designated the crime scene “as a distinct analytical space, bounded conceptually and operationally by explicit rules of practice, and recognized as such by forensic investigators and the broader public alike”. The third was Alphonse Bertillon's creation of the first forensic database used in his anthropometric technique in the mid-1890s. Anthropometry allowed for comparison to the database of measurements but only if the person of interest was present to be measured. The fourth discussed in this presentation is the use of proxy data, like trace evidence and fingerprints, that allowed for the comparison of evidence that was left behind to a set of records without the person needing to be present. Although Faulds and Henry considered the potential of fingerprinting in criminal investigations, it was Edmund Locard who realized Gross' dream of making the crime scene and its contents the focus of forensic activities. With his access to the criminal files that contained fingerprints of arrestees, Locard could now identify individuals who had been at a crime scene without them having to be present. Additionally, this allowed for the recognition of a fingerprint left at a scene or on an object to be the goal of a search in the files (the database) with no person of interest identified. These core concepts delineate the scale of forensic science from the macro (doctors and the deceased body) to meso (the scene) to micro (trace evidence and fingerprints) across its development.