Forensic Anthropology

Forensic anthropology identifies age, sex, ancestry and, where possible, cause of death from human skeletal remains, applying standardized measurements and comparison against large reference collections rather than general anatomical impression. The physical anthropologist Wilton Krogman gave the method its founding statement in 1939 with his Guide to the Identification of Human Skeletal Material, written for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, which for the first time organized existing skeletal science into a systematic protocol investigators could actually use, and the guide is still credited with uniting scattered earlier work into a discipline of its own.

Religious sites are frequently also burial sites, and claims about a sacred site's age, the identity of remains found there, or whether a burial was violent, ritual or ordinary are exactly the kind of question forensic anthropology can independently test against the skeleton itself, apart from any accompanying inscription, tradition or oral account. The atlas relies on forensic anthropological findings wherever a claim about a specific set of human remains, a saint's relics, a mass grave tied to religious violence, a burial in a sacred precinct, can be checked against the documented physical evidence.