Mandy Brothers

Recently, there has been debate as well as discussion of the utility within the different methods used to determine ancestry. Nevertheless, many concede that the assessment of ancestry (social race) should be included in the biological profile. Some argue against traditional anthroposcopic methods due to concerns about reinforcing the outmoded and potentially dangerous biological race concept, advocating instead for multivariate metric analysis.  In this analysis, I compare anthroposcopic observations using the OSSA protocol with multivariate analysis from FORDISC on a collection of crania of unknown ancestry. I observed significant concordance between the methods. For the individuals that showed discrepancies, further assessment of both protocols was undertaken. I conclude that anthroposcopic traits may be valuable, particularly for individuals not represented by the multivariate reference samples.