ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the background of the Asian Tsunami of 2004 and the international disaster victim identification (DVI) response that arose. Anthropology has a significant role to play at both a national and an international level in assisting the judicial investigation of homicide, mass disaster incidents, and crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The Asian Tsunami Wall of Remembrance commemorates the disaster and ensures that the world will not forget those who died on 26 December 2004; it also offers a focus for annual pilgrimage. On 12 January, the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) centre was established in Phuket. Many of the early problems in the tsunami identification programme arose through the inability to separate Indigenous from Western deceased with any degree of reliability. Comparison of antemortem and postmortem data was the primary remit of the tsunami scientific effort in an attempt to identify the deceased and to assign a name to the individual.
