Metric Analysis of Skeletal Remains: Methods and Applications

Human skeletal and dental remains continue to provide the most direct evidence for examining the biology of past populations (Larsen, 1997, 2002). Quantitative (i.e., metric) as well as more qualitative (i.e., nonmetric or discrete) aspects of human biological variation remain central to studies in physical anthropology since its inception. Measurement of living (anthropometry) and skeletal remains (osteome­ try and craniometry), and the methods for ana­ lyzing this category of variation represent one of the discipline's most notable contributions to science. Much of this early attention to measurement and description in physical anthropology focused on investigations of human population structure and past biological relationships, including the assignment of unknown speci­ mens to known reference groups. As was typical of the discipline as a whole during this formative period, these early studies of popu­ lation history were associated frequently with the now outdated concept of racial typology and classification. After this formative period, there have been major refinements in biological evolutionary theory and the methods for analyzing quantitative data, refinements that now provide a solid foundation for understand­ ing the history of human groups and biological relatedness among groups, past and present.