Masters Thesis

Specimens of morbid anatomy: a study of context and sorting methods of commingled human remains from the Point San José Ossuary

The primary goal of bioarchaeology is to learn about the life histories of past populations from the information recorded on the skeleton. Commingled skeletal assemblages present a significant obstacle to this goal; hindering the assessment of the demographics of an assemblage, as well as making it difficult to ascertain trends necessary to make inferences about health in life, and potential cause and manners of death for individuals within the assemblage. This thesis examines a 19th century commingled assemblage of human remains discovered at Point San José Military Reservation, now known as Fort Mason, in San Francisco, California. In total, more than 4,000 commingled elements were discovered in a small yard at the rear of the old hospital located on the reservation. The hypothesized origin of this assemblage is that of a discarded anatomical collection, which would disproportionately target the poor and marginalized individuals. This thesis seeks to find the individuals among the many, and to evaluate the methods employed to sort commingled remains. For this both qualitative and quantitative methods for sorting commingled remains were applied individually and in varying orders. It was found, that of all methods visual pair matching performed best individually, as it provided the most segregation while leaving a small group of confidently matched pairs. When examining the application of the methods in varying orders, it was found that the quantitative methods served best as an initial sorting of the assemblage, and that the subsequent application of the qualitative methods provided significant refinement of the original sort. Although these methods showed differences in their efficacy, they were not able to generate meaningful impacts of the demographic profile of the assemblage. The sorting of these remains did not provide discrete enough results to accomplish this aim, but in addition there was no evidence provided to contradict the demographic profile assessed from the unsorted assemblage.

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