The American Academy of Forensic Sciences recently featured on their social media pages a research article by Andrea Palmiotto (Anthropology, Geospatial and Earth Sciences) and her colleagues from the University of Oulu and the Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The article was part of an invited issue on disaster victim identification, published by the AAFS flagship Journal of Forensic Sciences. Palmiotto and her colleagues discussed methods of resolving skeletal commingling, which occurs when the bones of multiple individuals are mixed up and are difficult to separate back into individuals. Resolving commingling means that victims can be identified, and their loss incidents can be resolved.
Skeletal commingling can be difficult to resolve, but numerous methods are available to researchers depending on the condition and size of the skeletal assemblage. Their review highlighted advances in the field over the past 10 years, specifically emphasizing geochemical methods like DNA and proteomic assessments, and visual methods like pair matching and articulation.
The review was punctuated with a series of commingling case studies—including a WWII battleship, a Finnish bioarchaeological collection, and a study of how skeletal age impacts commingling resolution—to highlight the importance and challenges associated with these complicated assemblages.
Palmiotto and colleagues’ ongoing research tackles commingling resolutions from various perspectives, and Palmiotto credits her experience in zooarchaeology and fragmented skeletal remains for influencing how she approaches these projects. The JFS article, , can be accessed online.