This course will provide a general introduction to the practice of Forensic Anthropology in the medico-legal setting. It will begin with a general overview of what forensic Anthropologists do, their training and certification, discuss how we can help law enforcement agencies with the recovery and identification of burned, buried, skeletal, fragmentary, decomposed and scattered human remains.
The session will continue with a review of human osteology and a virtual quiz component where participants will get to test their osteology knowledge, making the determination if items are human, non-human, or non-osseous. There will also be a brief session of establishing forensic context of human remains, complete with a virtual quiz where participants can assess remains for forensic context.
The session will continue with an overview of how Forensic Anthropologists develop a biological profile from human skeletal remains. The biological profile consists of the age, sex ancestry and stature estimations. The course will conclude with the assessment of trauma from skeletal remains and how to differentiate that from postmortem taphonomy. Case examples will be used throughout the program.
Course Objectives:
- Learn about the training and certification of forensic anthropologists
- Differentiate between human and non-human skeletal remains
- Describe how forensic anthropologists develop a biological profile from human remains, including which skeletal elements are used for each segment of the biological profile
- Differentiate between osseous trauma and postmortem taphonomy