HISTORY OF FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY

• Jurisdiction: Australia

[35.60] Overview

The history of the science lies in the area of medical anatomy where the availability of collections of cadavers of known age, sex, race and stature made possible the establishment of skeletal collections for the study of skeletal variation and human origins and the development of osteometric methodology.

Within the United States, two major collections were established during the earlier part of the 20th century, one at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (3,300 individuals) and the other at the Washington University in St Louis, Missouri (1,636 individuals). These collections are named the Hamann-Todd Collection and the Terry Collection respectively in honour of the anatomists who initiated and continued the collections. The Hamann-Todd Collection is now housed in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, while the Terry Collection is located at the United States National Museum of Natural History within the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. These collections have been the mainstay of skeletal research within the United States since their establishment.

Both of the above collections were derived largely from the lower socio-economic classes within population groups that grew up and lived in the central west of the United States around the turn of the 19th century. They were not representative of those population groups as a whole, nor are they representative of modern population groups. Hence the results of ongoing studies based upon these collections are biased. Nevertheless, they still form the basis for much training and research in human osteology within the United States due to the lack of a suitable modern reference collection. This problem is being tackled by the Forensic Anthropology Section of the University of Tennessee, where a computerised skeletal database of modern forensic cases is being developed for reference by forensic scientists: Jantz and Moore-Jansen (1988).

A number of eminent American physical anthropologists who trained or worked on the above collections were eventually to become leaders in the field of forensic anthropology. Krogman (1935; 1943) and Stewart (1948) alerted their colleagues to the role of physical anthropologists in forensic identification. In 1939 the publication of Krogman's "A Guide to the Identification of Human Skeletal Material" established for the first time the formal association of forensic anthropology with medico-legal identification.

[35.70] Cadaveric skeletal...