Forensic Facial Reconstruction

Law enforcement agencies have relied on forensic art as one of their investigation methods for many years. The job of a forensic artist is quite difficult because he or she must reconstruct an image of an individual based on just hearsay and memory from another individual. The purpose of this study is to research forensic artists, also known as sketch artists, and their ability to draw up a suspect through the information provided by a witness. Interviews on two different forensic artists provide insight of the duties and hardships a law enforcement sketch artist takes on. The process of how law enforcement sketch artists are able to recreate the face of another individual, and how that picture can be a very useful piece of evidence for crime reports will also be addressed throughout the study. This study is relevant to anthropology because it touches on how how an individual perceives those around them and forensics itself is also one of the key topics discussed in biological anthropology.

Forensic anthropology is a subfield of physical anthropology that aims to assist in the identification of human remains and to help determine what happened to the remains (Ubelaker, 2006). A forensic anthropologist is able to aid law enforcement by narrowing down the list of possible victims. This subfield of anthropology consists of several processes and a vast list of duties that are important in providing positive identification.Even though forensic anthropology dates back many years, major advancements in this field are still being made today.

Facial reconstruction is used as a last resort to identify remains by placing clay atop the skeleton in hopes of reconstructing what that person may look like to get a possible identification. They would gather average tissue thickness from the ethnicity, gender, and age (children, teens, and adults) and apply it to the skull according to the correct gender,

The main tools for measuring Specimen 253 are the spreading calipers and the sliding calipers. For the Spreading calipers it has two measurement ways; Cranial Breath and Cranial length. The cranial breath it takes the measurement by moving the points of spreading the caliper along the Parietal bones until you find the maximum reading, at the euryon on both sides of the skull. Next is The Cranial Length which measure two point of the spreading from the forehead (Glabella) to the lower back of the head (Opisthocranion). Fix one of the spreading caliper points on the glabella and hold it with one hand and hold with the other end of the caliper at the Opisthocranion until you found the maximum reading. After you collected your data, you must use the Cephalic index formula to solve the overall size head of specimen 253 (Cranial index = Cranial Breath (100) / Cranial Length). After you finish with the spreading calipers, you will also be using the sliding calipers to measure the nasal region. This tool can measure two ways; the nasal breath and the nasal height. The nasal breath measure the widest portion of the nasal aperture, between the two alare landmarks. The nasal height, it measures from the inferior margin to the superior margins of the nasal bone. After you collected your data for the nasal region, you must apply the nasal index formula to your data (Nasal index = Nasal Breath (100) / Nasal Length). After you collected all you data, you must

After that they “analyze bones to determine the victim's biological profile” as it is said in “What is Forensic Anthropology” by R.U. Steinberg.

“This is my lab and what we do is study bones,” states Kari Bruwelheide in her video entitled “30,000 Skeletons”. Out of all three resources, “Puzzles of the Chesapeake” by Sally Walker, “Forensic Anthropology” by an unknown author, and “30,000 Skeletons” by Smithsonian Education, but presented by Kari Bruwelheide, “30,000 Skeletons” is by far better at explaining the role of an anthropologist. It is unbeatable because it is a video and Kari Bruwelheide has personal experience of being a forensic anthropologist. A forensic anthropologist is a scientist that studies human remains, or in another word, skeletons, to try to find out information.

Forensic anthropologist examine skeletal remains for elements of a skeleton that can give clues to the person it belongs to. The Kennewick man’s skeleton was found in surprisingly good condition meaning the damage to the skeleton was done in his life, not due to deterioration. The skeleton showed a projectile point lodged in his hip, five broken ribs that did not properly heal, two small dents in his skull, and a bum shoulder. These wounds show an insight to the lifestyle

Over the years, several techniques involving the analysis of human skeletal remains for the purposes of ancestral classification have been developed. Many of the earliest techniques involved the visual comparison of different morphoscopic traits and subsequent classification based on the anthropologist’s subjective opinion. Although many of these non-metric techniques have been shown to be

After finding some skeletal remains, the police have provided a list of three missing persons, Kim Lee, Theresa Woods and Jonathan Parker. While spending multiple days in the lab, plenty of information was collected to help with the identification of the bones, such as the sex of the victim, the age of the victim and the approximate height and race of the victim. This data was compiled to draw a conclusion and safely identify the remains.

As a forensic anthropologist, Brennan main focus is to assist law enforcement agencies with her knowledge to inspect skeletons. Her main motive in this case was to determine individual 's age, sex, time of death, and physical condition from their skeleton remains. It is extremely crucial that Brennan diagnoses the skeleton remains accurately, as the legal investigation greatly depends on it. Brennan refers to multiple biological anthropology methods while she was assessing

Dr. Brennen, a forensic anthropologist, finds remains all throughout the book in different scenarios. She finds human bones among lots of bear bones in a bag in the woods and she examines the remains of a baby found in a wood stove, in a plane crash, privy, and a submerged car. She briefly goes into discussion of what she does as a forensic anthropologist. She uses her knowledge of bones to identify the cause and manner of death in victims that are too compromised for autopsy; meaning there is little to no tissue left for a proper autopsy. (Reichs 2004:16). She also uses various methods throughout the book to identify the sex, age, stature, and ancestry, as well as securing an identification of the victim.

Skulls dating back to the 1000s CE were found with man-made holes in them, being the first pieces of evidence of brain surgery. Most of the skulls from this time showed no signs of bone repair, meaning that surgery must have been fatal at one point. (National Geographic 2008) The development of brain surgery took place over the next 400 years, showing an immense amount of improvement in the procedure. The most recent skulls found by archeologists demonstrated many signs of bone repair, and researchers even discovered that bone surgery went from being fatal to have a 90% success rate in the 1400s (National Geographic 2008).

At the homicide there was a body of a young woman found on the kitchen floor with a stab wound in her stomach. A forensic anthropologist was investigating the victims age and how long she had been dead. A forensic artist interviewed a witness who claims to have seen the suspect leave the house after the estimated time of the murder and sketched an image of the suspect.

This technique involves science and art as it guesses on how the soft tissues may have fitted on the skull based on skull characteristics, sex, and race. The facial sculpting uses molding clay to create a modal of what the victim may have looked like in life. However, if this fails we could use carbon-14 dating. Carbon- 14 dating deals with the radiocarbon found in the air we breathe due to the above ground nuclear testing increase; teeth grown in intervals and absorb these microscopic molecules. In adults they can help date time of birth within a 1.5 range which can allow for investigators to search for hospitals that apply to the year of birth with the other evidence such as race, sex, age, ect to help narrow the search. Additionally, another test we could use called bone analysis. It is a basic test because, simply put, it is the observation of the bones. Bone analysis permits the collecting of past injuries to the bone such as a broken femur or a fracture to the occipital region of the skull that could be used to slim down the search among missing persons. Thus, allowing investigators to exclude missing persons who do not have these past injuries to the bone and focus on whose who's families have reported that they

A forensic anthropologist examining a cranium exhumed from a mass grave. The work was conducted as part of a project headed by the International Commission on Missing Persons.