Forensic anthropology case study

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1. Forensic A nthropology C ase S tudy

2. What is Forensic Anthropology? Forensic anthropology is the application of anatomical science of anthropology and its various subfields. A forensic anthropologist can assist in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unorganizable.

3. How does this work? Forensic anthropologist use regression equations to determine sex, age, status and race of skeletal remains. Regression equations are mathematical equations developed from studies of bones individuals of known sex, age, race and stature and are used to predict such things of even fragmentary skeletal remains.

4. Anthropology case study Forensic anthropologists at the National Museum of Natural History find answers to a colonial cold case The boy does not have a name, but he is not unknown. Smithsonian scientists reconstructed his story from a skeleton, found in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, buried underneath a layer of fireplace ash, bottle and ceramic fragments, and animal bones .

5. Resting on top of the rib cage was the milk pan used to dig the grave. "It's obviously some sort of clandestine burial," says Kari Bruwelheide, who studied the body. " We call it a colonial cold case .“ Bruwelheide is an assistant to forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley. After more than a decade of cases that span the centuries, the duo has curated "Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th-Century Chesapeake," on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History through February 2011.  Take the boy in the clandestine grave. Since the 1990s, the Lost Towns Project in Annapolis, Maryland—which aims to rediscover settlements that have disappeared from the landscape

6. The boy's skeleton was crammed into a cellar pit with a broken ceramic milk pan lying across his rib cage. 

7. Identification of boy through his skull He recognized that the skull belonged to a Caucasian male. Further analyses indicated the male was of European descent and 15 to 16 years old . The boy's spine and teeth were damaged from hard labor or disease. This profile fit that of an indentured servant in the Chesapeake Bay of the mid-17th century.

8. Based on artifacts ….. Based on the artifacts surrounding the body including a coin dated 1664 and a piece of window that has a date stamp of 1663 archaeologist Jane Cox determined that the boy had died between 1665 and 1675 .

9. Case closed… The boy's right wrist was fractured in a way that suggested he used his arm to block a strong blow shortly before his death. That injury, along with the awkward burial, points to a violent end. "They were burying him in secret so they would not have to report the death," Bruwelheide surmises. Evidence of traumatic bone fracture helped this colonial cold case to close