Section 5:
In this Section you will
List the Interdisciplinary Areas of Overlap for Skeletal Analysis
What other discipline areas overlap within the osteological realms of forensic anthropology and skeletal biology?
Forensic Cases Skeletal Biology Cases Forensic cases have legal implications so this area is an applied specialization (narrow focus) where methods and techniques derived from osteology are used for larger, general purposes:
- identify individual
- identify individual in mass disasters
- identify modern trauma and disease
- time since death
- narrower purpose to ID but broader in that it is used outside anthropology (legal system)
Skeletal biology is using methods, techniques derived from osteology to answer questions within the anthropological realm:
- past cultures lifeways
- demographics (paleodemography)
- state of health (mortality - age at death, morbidity - how sick and how healthy)
- goal across time and space; broader but limited to scope of past societies worldwide
Now that we see that forensic cases and skeletal biology cases differ in the methods used, let's look at some disciplines which often overlap during the analysis process...
