ANTH 1217

Students will study the concepts and techniques that forensic anthropologists use to identify human skeletal remains for legal purposes. Techniques for assessing age-at-death, stature, and sex to learn how to analyze a skeleton to the level of individual identity will be studied. The class will also explore the challenges, both scientific and social, of determining "ancestry" based on biological remains by learning how forensic anthropologists have come to rely on their understanding of population genetics in the context of forensic individualization and human biological variation. Study of how cause and manner of death, and the postmortem interval affect the ability to apply forensic anthropological techniques will be identified.