No abstract

This paper explores the current state of forensic anthropology in the United States as a distinct discipline. Forensic anthropology has become increasingly specialized and the need for strengthened professionalization is becoming paramount. This includes a need for clearly defined qualifications, training, standards of practice, certification processes, and ethical guidelines. Within this discussion, the concept of expertise is explored in relation to professionalization and practice, as both bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology have different areas of specialist knowledge, and therefore unique expertise. As working outside one’s area of expertise is an ethical violation, it is important for professional organizations to outline requisite qualifications, develop standards and best practice guidelines, and enforce robust preventive ethical codes in order to serve both their professional members and relevant stakeholders.

We review the current and potential uses of Geographic Information Software (GIS) and "spatial thinking" for understanding body disposal behaviour in times of mass fatalities, particularly armed conflict contexts. The review includes observations made by the authors during the course of their academic research and professional consulting on the use of spatial analysis and GIS to support Humanitarian Forensic Action (HFA) to search for the dead, theoretical and statistical considerations in modelling grave site locations, and suggestions on how this work may be advanced further.

This case review illustrates the important contributions of forensic archeological methods and forensic anthropological analysis to the identification of found skeletal remains. After reassociation of skeletal remains found in two locations, anthropological analysis provided the basis for a presumptive identification and a request for antemortem medical records. Partial DNA profiles were supportive but not conclusive and antemortem dental records were not available. Comparison of antemortem traumas, skeletal morphology, and surgical artifacts with antemortem radiographs and surgical records led to positive identification of an individual missing for almost a decade.

Between 2005 and 2007 archaeologists and anthropologists excavated the burial site of more than four hundred bodies, people who died or were killed during and soon after the Spanish Civil War and Post-War Repression. This article presents an analysis of eight mass graves. Evidence from these graves strongly suggests that the bodies are those of victims of extrajudicial killings during a purge from a transition period between the end of the war and the beginning of a more controlled, though brutal, postwar repression . Although our work was not part of a formal medicolegal investigation, we argue that the context warranted such and the approach used in this and similar situations should be forensic. We also suggest that forensic practitioners go further in their interpretation than we have seen in past exhumations to include the incorporation of multiple lines of evidence, reflecting holistic archaeological and anthropological practice and expertise. [forensic archaeology, forensic anthropology, Spanish Civil War, exhumation, social justice]