Essay on Forensic Anthropology

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Assaf 1
Carolyn Assaf
Ms. DeSalvo
Writing 8-Mic
4 April 2014
Forensic Anthropology Wolf Wolf ! I was in the pet market buying food for my dog when I heard a dog barking outside . I looked around to see where my dog is , but I didn’t find him . I realized that the dog barking was my dog , so I ran quickly to get him when I saw my dog coming towards me with a bone in his mouth . Since I am a Forensic Anthropologist , I recognized something weird about the bone . I visualized from my experience that the bone looks like a human bone . My dog lead me to where he found the bone . It was as I expected . I was amazed. A human body laying inside a water well . The killer had planted flowers on top of the well to hide his crime . The body looked like it was buried long ago . So, I called my friend Dr. Charles , he is an archaeologist who deals with past human life and activities by studying the bones , tools , etc. , of ancient people , and Dr. Howell , a chief archaeologist in the 1950s and 60s .This became the first step of solving the case . We were all working together as a team . Dr Howell had informed us that the English Civil War spread to the colonizers around the 1650's, and that The Battle of the Severn River was fought right over a hill near the well in 1655 . We know that after the battle , four prisoners were executed , but no graves were ever found . Dr Howell told me to check if there were any other bodies in the well . I went to check , but unfortunately there were none . It would have given us a lot more clues . At that time , we were not sure if the victim was an executed prisoner of war or not . Although we didn’t find another body , we did find several artifacts with and on top of the body that we should be able to date . Pretty soon , we had been capable of having a good idea when our mystery person died . The coins we found were dated in 1664 , and the piece of window lead that was on top of the body had a date stamp of 1663 . We used a variety of facts to determine the terminus post quem . Dr Howell had told us before that the Battle of the Severn River happened years earlier , in 1655 . So , the body can't be one of the executed soldiers . Our mystery person might not have been a soldier , but we knew a date after he or she was buried . To comprehend more about when the victim died , I took the body to my lab to get a closer look on the wounds that could help me identify trauma . The victim's skull fracture happened after he or she died. So, it was postmortem . It was perhaps caused by the weight of the dirt and the plants above his skull . His or her elbow was also injured , but had already healed . Also , The spine and teeth were damaged , possibly from physical labor or disease . Dr Bass mentioned in his article " Dead Men Talking " , "Trauma helps determine the perimortem of a corpse ." So I have figured out trauma , and the time of death . Is there anything else ? The most important item to identify is the biological profile , because it tells us everything about the victim . The first thing I identified from the biological profile was the
Assaf 2 age of the victim , because it is the easiest to verify . Angela Libal explains is the article "What is Forensic Anthropology " , "Several parts of the skeleton gives clues to age , such as teeth , the sutures of the skull , and the ends of the clavicle . We also used the Kerley method . This technique takes a very thin portion of the bone and places it under a microscope , because a microscope can help us distinguish the osteons that once carried blood through the bone . They develop rings over time ,
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