Forensic Anthropology

Catalog description

Provides an introduction to the practice of forensic anthropology. Forensic anthropology is an applied subfield of biological anthropology. Forensic anthropologists are often crucial in identifying victims of mass fatalities resulting from both natural and human-made disasters, homicides (both historic and recent), human rights abuses, and war deaths. Introduces the underlying theory and the applied techniques that forensic anthropologists use to recover and identify individuals and assess what happened to the individual before and after death. Through both lecture and lab sessions, topics will include skeletal biology, disease and trauma that can be seen on bone, methods used by forensic anthropologists, and the ethical concerns that arise when working with human remains in a medicolegal context.