#Ethical considerations of Forensic Archaeologists

[forensicfield]

The Role Of Forensic Archaeologists In Crime Scene Investigation

Forensic archaeologists are brought into service only when normal, usual investigative techniques are considered inadequate. This expertise in cases of buried remains, clandestine burials or complex scenes comes in very handy. By Vaishnavi Narreddy.

Continue reading The Role Of Forensic Archaeologists In Crime Scene Investigation

[yeartoagecalculatortool]

How to Use a Calculator for Determining Age Differences

History is a treasure trove of mysteries waiting to be unraveled. One of the most intriguing aspects of historical research is uncovering the stories of individuals who lived in the past. But what happens when all we have left of these individuals are their remains? How can we determine the age of a deceased person from long ago? Fortunately, modern science has provided us with innovative tools and calculators that help us unlock the secrets of history. In this blog post, we'll explore how to determine the age of a deceased person using our calculator, shedding light on the lives of those who came before us.

The Importance of Age Estimation

Age estimation is a crucial component of forensic anthropology and archaeology. It allows us to piece together the puzzle of someone's life, including their lifestyle, health, and potential cause of death. Accurately determining the age of a deceased individual can provide valuable insights into the historical context in which they lived.

Our Age Estimation Calculator

Our age estimation calculator www.yeartoage.com is a powerful tool that utilizes a combination of scientific methods to provide an estimate of a deceased person's age. Here's how it works:

Skeletal Analysis: The first step in determining age involves examining the skeletal remains of the individual. Bones can reveal a wealth of information, including age-related changes such as the fusion of bones, dental wear, and bone density.

Dental Examination: Teeth are remarkable indicators of age. By examining the wear and eruption patterns of teeth, our calculator can make accurate estimates of age. Dental health also reflects dietary habits, which can provide additional historical context.

Epiphyseal Fusion: In young individuals, the fusion of epiphyses (the ends of long bones) occurs over time. By examining the degree of fusion, our calculator can estimate the age of individuals who died during their developmental years.

Bone Density Measurement: Bone density decreases with age, making it another valuable factor in age estimation. Our calculator utilizes advanced techniques to measure bone density and factor it into the age estimate.

Statistical Algorithms: All the collected data is fed into a sophisticated statistical algorithm that considers various factors and provides an estimated age range for the deceased person.

Applications in Archaeology

Our age estimation calculator has a wide range of applications in the field of archaeology. By accurately determining the age of individuals from historical sites, we can gain insights into ancient societies' demographics, health, and burial practices. This information helps historians and archaeologists paint a more detailed picture of the past.

Forensic Implications

In forensic anthropology, accurate age estimation can be crucial for solving criminal cases. By determining the age of unidentified remains, law enforcement can narrow down the list of potential victims and focus their investigations. Our calculator plays a vital role in this process, aiding in the pursuit of justice and closure for families.

Ethical Considerations

It's essential to approach the study of human remains with the utmost respect and sensitivity. Our calculator is a valuable tool, but its use should always be guided by ethical principles. Researchers and scientists must consider the cultural and ethical implications of their work and collaborate with indigenous communities when appropriate.

Conclusion

Unlocking history through age estimation is a fascinating journey that allows us to connect with the people of the past. Our age estimation calculator is a powerful tool that combines science and technology to shed light on the lives of those who came before us. By accurately determining the age of a deceased person, we can gain valuable insights into their historical context, making history come alive in a whole new way.

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Explains Bone - Part 1

(These posts will be collected under the tag KyidylBones because I have the sense of humor of a 13 year old boy.  Also, I’m going to start cross-posting them to my science side blog @science-of-anthropology​ in an effort to like give people a place to go if they’re just here for these posts and not for my other random thoughts.  That blog also contains a lot of decent info from the days I was premed and taking premed physical science classes.)

Intro and Ethical Considerations

Ok, all you weird nerds out there (<3), how’s your day going? Good? Are you ready to hear me ramble about one of my favorite things on earth? Well, then gather ‘round ye old tumblr fire.  We’re gonna learn about *people*! Because all the stuff I taught you before was stuff you basically learn in anthropology undergrad and in a field school.  But! I *specialized*.  I have secret powe--*coughs* I mean, a special interest.  See, my favorite topic in the whole world, the one on which I will ADHD infodump for DAYS about if you let me, is the intersection of human evolution and culture.  My ultimate goal is either to work in a museum, or be a scientist that studies this.  That’s why I went out and got a masters.  

A bioarchaeology masters not only taught me how to dig up people, but a whole HOST of other things related to people and digging (Like genetics and using drones to survey an area for digging.). But before we can get into the details, there’s a few things you have to understand.  First: 

On sex, race, ethnicity, and gender

Anthropologists of all kinds are well, WELL aware that these 4 things are extremely fraught and extremely complicated.  Probably more aware than any of the other sciences.  But, when you learn to identify skeletons you learn to do it based on sex and race for a couple reasons: 

1. When identifying a body for the police department, their databases are entirely based on these identifying characteristics.  A lot of forensic anthropologists work with the police to identify remains.  If we can’t pick out demographic qualities then we’d never match them up to people in the missing persons database who are listed along a sex binary and racial categories.  But believe me when I tell you we all do it under duress and in annoyance because we know how complicated these things are for people.  

2. When dealing with populations that are gone and can’t tell us what they identified as, we arrange them by sex and race to make some sort of sense of the demographics of an area.  This is how we know, for example, that people from Africa intermingled early and often with people from Europe.  Being able to ID these markers on a skeleton is faster and cheaper than DNA tests and often the only method available, especially in prehistoric populations. 

So I will be discussing features on bones in these terms, but understand that it’s not my way of excluding trans people.  We, as of yet, just have no good way of *identifying* trans people in the archaeological record. 

And second:

Ethics

Ethics is a huge and thorny topic so I’m going to only make a couple notes here.  I bounced this series around in my head for awhile and the reason I didn’t do it sooner is that despite having human remains in my possession for legitimate scientific reasons, it’s extremely unethical for me to post pictures of them on the open internet.  The same goes for the tons of pictures I have of human remains from my masters studies.  To that ends, the images I’ll be using will fall into one of four categories: images from my textbooks, images on the public web that are available for educational use, and images of Bone Clones, and my own image of damage patterns on animal bones.  This is also a warning that, yes, there will be images of human remains here.  I’ve decided, though, that when a post starts to contain human remains, I’ll insert a cut.  So you will not be surprised by human remains randomly in your timeline.  

Now, here are some ethical things I need you guys to understand and adhere to: 

- These people had names in life, and you do not get to give them new ones.  Naming a skeleton is verbotten in archaeology circles, and often will extend to Bone Clones because they are casts of real bones. The correct terminology here is either “the/this individual” or “the remains”. If specificity is needed they’re either given an identification number or referred to by their demographic information.  If you have the name of the individual bc there was a gravestone or records, then it’s ok to use it.  Often we don’t though for privacy reasons.  

- These were people.  They had tastes, beliefs, people who loved them, etc. - all of which were different than mine or yours.  Please keep that in mind when commenting.  

- There is no ethical way for a lay person to obtain human remains, aside from direct donation by a relative or friend.  No, I don’t care what they website says in their statement about ethical sourcing.  They did NOT obtain the remains ethically.  The people who sold the remains almost always do so under duress, usually economic.  And if they weren’t given, they were stolen.  There is No.  Ethical.  Way.  To.  Purchase.  Human.  Bone.

- Modern bone collections obtained by institutions for education usually are obtained ethically.  Often via donation by a living donor before their death for the purpose of scientific education.  In other instances they are obtained from legally-dug excavations, from donation by family members (IE, no money exchanged and consent given.), or with some other kind of permission.  However, there are many existing bone collections that pre-date this practice and are NOT obtained ethically.  In the US these are undergoing identification (we’ll get to this in another post) and repatriation, but this is just one of the many thorny issues that physical anthropologists and archaeologists have to be aware of.  

- What other societies do with their human remains is going to seem strange and sometimes disgusting or objectionable to you.  Not always, but definitely sometimes.  This is their choice and in this house we respect the emic (within the social group) view on death rituals.  

I think that’s everything...if I remember more I’ll sprinkle them in as I go along.  Ethical violations are a Big Deal among archaeologists and other social scientists who handle human remains.  It’s one of the few things we don’t joke about (because as we all know, archaeologists are forces of chaos.).  The history of completely unethical treatment in the field makes us very sensitive to how human remains are handled and where they came from.  Questions are 100% fine - you all are still learning and I’m not gonna get mad at you for not knowing yet.  I’ll gently let you know if it’s inappropriate.  

So here’s the stuff I’m planning on getting to: 

Human vs. Animal

Sex identification.  

Racial identification.  

Age identification. 

Teeth! 

Damage to the skeleton (this might be two posts.).  

Other random stuff that might come up while I’m doing the other things.  

So....let’s begin....mwahahahahahahahaha. And for making it to the bottom of this post you get a bonus picture of me AND the dog:

His name is Gage, and my name is Kristina - you’re welcome to use it.  I know probably “Kyidyl” isn’t easy to say in your heads.  :) It’s pronounced kai-dul if you were every wondering tho.  Now you can put a face to the internet voice. :) 

[ezatluba]

When Cadaver Dogs Pick Up a Scent, Archaeologists Find Where to Dig

Recent research highlights the power of the canine nose to uncover buried remains from ancient human history.

Shiraz, a cadaver dog enlisted to hunt for archaeological remains in February at a suspected Native American burial site in Gulf Breeze, Fla.Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

By Cat Warren

May 19, 2020

On a sunny summer day in Croatia several years ago, an archaeologist and two dog handlers watched as two dogs, one after another, slowly worked their way across the rocky top of a wind-scoured ridge overlooking the Adriatic Sea.

Bodies had lain in beehive-shape tombs on this necropolis, part of the prehistoric hill fort of Drvišica, since the Iron Age. The two dogs, trained to detect human remains, were searching for scents that were thousands of years old.

Panda, a Belgian Malinois with a “sensitive nose,” according to her handler, Andrea Pintar, had begun exploring the circular leftovers of a tomb when she suddenly froze, her nose pointed toward a stone burial chest. This was her signal that she had located the scent of human remains.

Ms. Pintar said the hair on her arms rose. “I was skeptical, and I was like, ‘She is kidding me,’” she recalled thinking about her dog that day.

Archaeologists had found fragments of human bone and teeth in the chest, but these had been removed months earlier for analysis and radiocarbon dating. All that was left was a bit of dirt, the stone slabs of the tomb and the cracked limestone of the ridge.

Human-remains detection dogs, or cadaver dogs, are used worldwide on land and water. Well-trained dogs help find the missing and dead in disasters, accidents, murders and suicides. But the experiment in Croatia marked the start of one of the most careful inquiries yet carried out of an unusual archaeological method. If such dogs could successfully locate the burial sites of mass executions, dating from World War II through the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s, might they be effective in helping archaeologists find truly ancient burials?

On the scent of new tombs

Panda wasn’t kidding. Neither was Mali, the other Belgian Malinois trained by Ms. Pintar and her husband, Christian Nikolić. Each dog gave her final indications that day by either sitting or lying inside the flattened circle of the tombs, their noses pointing toward the burial chests within. In some cases they leapt into the small burial chests before offering an alert.

The dogs’ archaeological expedition had been initiated by Vedrana Glavaš, an archaeologist at Croatia’s University of Zadar. She already knew a great deal about the necropolis at Drvišica, having fully excavated and analyzed the contents of three tombs there. Inside each were rough limestone burial chests. She and her team recovered amber beads, belt buckles, bronze pins, teeth and phalanges. Each chest once held at least two bodies, which radiocarbon dating confirmed were 2,700 years old. The skeletal material was highly fragmented, however, and is still being analyzed.

But were there other tombs on the site, and could the dogs help locate them?

After that first preliminary search and its surprising result, Dr. Glavaš had beers at a local pub with the dogs’ handlers. They decided to hold off any discussion for a few weeks.

“We needed to think a little bit about what just happened,” Dr. Glavaš said.

That “test run” was the beginning of a careful study on whether human-remains detection dogs could be an asset to archaeologists. Setting up a controlled study was difficult. Dr. Glavaš had to learn the scientific literature, such as scent theory, far outside the standard confines of archaeology; the same was true for Ms. Pintar and the field of archaeology.

The training challenges were also difficult. Ancient human remains probably present a different and fainter scent profile than more recently deceased cadavers, especially as decades turn into centuries and then millenniums. False negatives seemed likely to occur.

“I think dogs are really capable of this, but I think it’s a logistical challenge,” said Adee Schoon, a scent-detection-animal expert from the Netherlands who was not involved in the study. “It’s not something you can replicate again and again. It’s hard to train.”

And, as Dr. Schoon noted, dogs are “great anomaly detectors.” Something as subtle as recently disturbed soil can elicit a false alert from a dog that is not rigorously trained.

Nonetheless, the team returned to the necropolis for the first controlled tests in September 2015, and again a full year later. Both times, they used all four of Ms. Pintar and Mr. Nikolić’s cadaver dogs: Panda, Mali, a third Belgian Malinois and a German shepherd. They worked them on both known and double-blind searches, in areas where nobody knew if tombs were located.

The dogs located four tombs new to the archaeologists. Dr. Glavaš had suspected that a fifth site might hold a burial chest, and the dogs’ alerts, combined with excavation, proved her suspicion correct.

In September 2019, the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory published the results of their study: “This research has demonstrated that HRD dogs are able to detect very small amounts of specific human decomposition odor as well as to indicate to considerably older burials than previously assumed,” Dr. Glavaš and Ms. Pintar wrote.

Dr. Schoon, who researches and helps create protocols to train scent-detection animals worldwide, said the Iron Age necropolis study was nicely designed and “really controlled.”

Archaeological cold cases

Panda and Mali aren’t the only dogs in the world that have helped locate human archaeological remains. In the United States, human remains detection dogs have aided discoveries at a variety of Native American sites, some badly damaged by looters and earlier generations of archaeologists with less ethical approaches to excavation, as well as by development and agriculture.

Paul Martin, a dog handler and trainer in Tennessee who is finishing his doctorate in earth sciences and geoarchaeology at the University of Memphis, has studied using dogs to find older remains for nearly two decades, demonstrating their capabilities at some of the large earthen mounds across the eastern United States that were once surrounded by flourishing Native American cities and villages.

His curiosity was piqued in 2002. Mr. Martin and his trained search dog were helping look for a murder victim in a Mississippi county where an informant said the victim was buried on “an old Indian mound.” The dog started showing intense interest at the mound, and Mr. Martin suspected that it wasn’t the more recent murder that held the dog’s attention.

He spoke with John Sullivan, then a state archaeologist at Winterville Mounds near Greenville, Miss. Mr. Sullivan was curious, too: “Paul asked me if dogs would pick up old stuff and I said, ‘Only one way to find out.’”

Mr. Martin started inviting experienced cadaver dogs and handlers to train on and near intact mounds. For years, they recorded dogs’ alerts on mounds in two areas of Mississippi, and even in fields nearby, where earlier mounds were probably flattened.

But getting funding and permission to do excavations is difficult. The alerts remained unconfirmed. Nonetheless, nature sometimes kicks out some free clues. That’s what happened on Mound H in Winterville, Miss., in 2006.

Rodents provided “ground-truthing,” or confirming evidence, free of charge by digging new burrows and displacing what had been hidden for centuries. Just downhill from where a number of human remains detection dogs had alerted during earlier training, “we actually saw a trail of bone coming down the side of the mound,” Mr. Martin said.

A forensic anthropologist confirmed the bones were human, including a child’s scapula. Mr. Sullivan believes they come from the last burials at the site, and date to around 1450 A.D.

Cadaver dogs are also helping archaeologists at some especially challenging sites. Mike Russo and Jeff Shanks, archaeologists with the National Park Service’s Southeast Archeological Center, had created at least 14 test holes near a promising site in northwest Florida that had been flattened during an earlier era of less diligent archaeology. They found nothing.

“We knew where it should be, but when we went there, there was absolutely no mound,” Mr. Russo said.

They then asked Suzi Goodhope, a longtime cadaver-dog handler in Florida, to bring her experienced detection dog, Shiraz, a Belgian Malinois, to the site in 2013. Shiraz and Ms. Goodhope worked the flat, brushy area for a long time. Then, Shiraz sat. Once.

“I was pretty skeptical,” Mr. Shanks said.

Nonetheless, the archaeologists dug. And dug. They went down nearly three feet — and there they found a human toe bone more than 1,300 years old.

Passing sniff tests

What is the future of using human-remains detection dogs as a noninvasive tool in archaeology?

Some archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, geologists, scientists — and even H.R.D. dog handlers who know how challenging the work is — say they have great potential. But challenges abound.

Although researchers are learning ever more about the canine olfactory system, they are still trying to pinpoint what volatile organic compounds in human remains are significant to trained dogs.

It’s also unclear what concentration of human remains a trained dog can detect, and which aspects of a given environment help retain the scent.

Ms. Pintar and Dr. Glavaš speculate that at the site in Croatia used in their study, the porous and cracked limestone on the ridge might play a role in the longevity of the scent there. Perhaps the mountain itself — used as the base of each burial chest — held on to the scent for thousands of years. But more research will need to be completed to confirm these findings.

Detection dogs also must be trained for archaeology with more consistency. Often humans are the limiting factor. Sometimes, Dr. Schoon said, she can almost see a dog thinking, “Is that all you want me to do? I can do much more!”

And dogs are only a complement to more standard archaeological tools, Mr. Martin noted. The best results come when good human-remains detection dog teams are combined with ground-penetrating radar, geophysical surveys and historical information, and — when feasible or desirable — confirmed with soil tests or excavation.

But more archaeologists around the world are taking note of detection dogs’ potential. Ms. Goodhope has continued working with park service archaeologists on lost slave cemeteries, Civil War sites and other early Native American sites. And Mr. Sullivan, now with the federal Bureau of Land Management, continues to work with dogs and handlers to locate, and avoid the destruction of, Native American sites.

Since Ms. Pintar and Dr. Glavaš’s Croatia study was published last year, several European and Croatian archaeologists have asked them for help in identifying sites, too.

As for the Iron Age necropolis high on the rocky ridge at Drvišica? Dr. Glavaš said she doesn’t intend to return to excavate there.

“Something has to be left for future archaeologists.”