Contribution of Quantitative Methods in Forensic Anthropology: A New Era

In the United States the first methods for estimating the biological profile of unknown individuals in a forensic context were developed in the 19th century by Thomas Dwight (1843-1911). Dr. Dwight, a Harvard anatomist, used “inverse regression”1 to estimate stature, sex, and age from skeletal remains. Although the field of forensic anthropology would not become officially recognized in the United States by the forensic sciences as its own discipline until after 1972,2 the methods produced by Dwight set the stage for the early development of the field and established its quantitative basis (Stewart 1979; I˙s¸can 1989).