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Trauma In Forensic Pathological Analysis

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Introduction
When a person dies, the natural forces of decomposition cause for the soft tissue to breakdown and ultimately disappear over time. If enough time has gone by, any soft tissue evidence present at the time of death will also have disappeared. Once this has occurred, it is up to forensic anthropologists to analyze the skeletal remains for evidence of trauma in order to help the forensic pathologist assign a cause and manner of death to this individual. The task is complicated by the similarities between antemortem and perimortem injuries, the presence of skeletal anomalies, as well as the postmortem changes that can occur when skeletal remains are exposed to the elements of nature.
Although procedures and protocols have been established …show more content…

This becomes a challenge for forensic anthropologists, as missing body parts means that a full skeletal analysis cannot take place. Although there are other mechanisms, besides dismemberment, by which remains from one decedent could be in different locations (such as a dog scavenging the remains), dismemberment can be identified by the visual analysis of saw, axe, or knife marks at the ends of the dismembered bones. To aid the visibility of these marks, it is recommended that a mold and cast of the incisions be made before analysis. Many studies have been conducted that allow anthropologists to determine the blade width, shape, and the direction of the cut by the visual examination of the bones (Byers, 2011). History of cases concerning dismemberment of remains has also shown that the cut marks associated with it will cluster around attachment sites for ligaments or tendons (Buikstra and Ubelaker, …show more content…

Nakhaeizadeh et al. studied the power of contextual effects in producing bias in interpretations of trauma on skeletal remains. Ninety-nine forensic anthropologists were randomly assigned to three different websites, all of which contained the very same fourteen images of bones that contained known trauma, pseudo-trauma, anomalies, and taphonomical process characteristics. However, one website included contextual information with the images, reporting that they were from a mass grave. The second website reported that the bones in the images came from an archaeological dig in an area with a known low level of trauma. Finally, the third website was a control and contained no contextual information. The participants were asked to assign levels of trauma to each picture, with varying options available. The results concluded that there were significantly higher recordings of trauma in the bones affiliated with the “mass grave” than the exact same pictures of bones from the other two websites (Nakhaeizadeh et al.,

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