A Critical Look at Methods for Recovering, Evaluating, and Interpreting Cremated Human Remains

Abstract

There has been renewed discussion with respect to expanding the role of forensic anthropologists in the criminal investigation of partially to fully decomposed remains from outdoor contexts ( Dirkmaat, 1998a ; Dirkmaat and Adovasio, 1997 ). An important part of this expanded role is an early entrance in the investigative sequence; that is, during the search and recovery of remains and during the postmortem examination. This expanded approach will lead to a more comprehensive recovery of contextual and associational data and information relevant to taphonomic reconstructions, and thereby allow for more accurate reconstructions of victim identity, issues related to manner of death, and circumstances surrounding the death event. Field recoveries of forensic evidence are most effective and efficient when contemporary archaeological recovery methods and interpretations are utilized ( Dirkmaat and Adovasio, 1997 ; Hochrein, 1997 , 1998 ; Morse et al., 1983 ; Nawrocki, 1998 ; Skinner and Lazenby, 1983 ). In what follows, it will be argued that similar benefits to event reconstruction can also be attained in contexts involving human remains partially or wholly destroyed by fire when the anthropologist is involved in the recovery of the remains in their initial undisturbed context (e.g., Bass, 1984 ; Dirkmaat, 1991 ) as well as during the postmortem examination ( Dirkmaat, 1998b ).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.