ABSTRACT
Arguably, World War II saw the application of technology to the task of warfare on an unprecedented scale. Virtually every facet of the modern army was touched by science-from the creation of the atomic bomb to the dehydration of coœee. One aspect that goes largely unnoticed, however, was the enlistment of physical anthropologists in what was to become one of the largest biometric studies of a single population in the history of mankind. Early in the war the U.S. Quartermaster Corps, desiring to out t a modern army with uniforms and equipment that t and were eªcient to use, hired physical anthropologists to compile anthropometric data on the American population. It is not surprising then that a„er the war, when the Quartermaster Corps was assigned the awesome task of identifying the remains of thousands of unaccounted-for U.S. soldiers, they turned to the same group of scientists for the solution. For this reason, much of the history of U.S. forensic anthropology as a scienti c subdiscipline mirrors the history of the U.S. military’s eœorts to recover and identify its war dead. What follows, then is a brief history of that eœort.
