Introduction
The estimation of the sex of a deceased person from an analysis of skeletal remains is one of the first procedures undertaken by anthropologists and osteologists as the sex of a person affects other analyses such as estimation of ancestry and age at death (e.g., Rowbotham 2016). In forensic cases, the estimation of sex is pivotal in contributing to the identification of unknown bodies as determining whether the individual is male or female halves the number of possible matches.
Definition
The sex of an individual is a biologically determined variable and differs from the gender of a person which is a social construct (e.g., Agarwal and Wesp 2017).
Key Issues
Age of the Individual
There has been considerable research undertaken on estimating the sex of an individual from the examination of juvenile skeletal remains (e.g., Bilfeld et al. 2013; Cunningham 2014). However, estimating the sex of individuals who have not reached puberty is limited because in most cases the...
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Further Reading
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Blau, S. (2018). Sex Assessment. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_140-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_140-2
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