Estimating Adult Age at Death: Cranial Suture Closure

Abstract

Cranial sutures, or lines of contact between different bones of the skull, begin to progressively fuse in early adulthood, resulting in the closure and eventual obliteration of the sutures later in life. As such, bioarchaeologists and forensic anthropologists can use the degree of cranial suture closure to estimate an adult individual's age at death from their skeletal remains. A number of specific techniques and methodologies have been developed for estimating age at death from suture closure using different sets of sutures and comparative samples. Although cranial suture closure aging has the advantage of being one of the only age estimation methodologies that can be performed on cranial remains alone, a number of other factors limit its usefulness and reliability, including a high degree of interindividual variability in the rate of suture closure and disagreement on how suture closure varies by sex and population. Consequently, cranial suture closure is typically only used to estimate age in conjunction with other, more reliable techniques or when other methods are impossible.