Justin Goldstein

(New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner’s Forensic Anthropology Unit)

“A Reintroduction to Forensic Anthropology”

Thursday, October 24, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

951 Schermerhorn Extension

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS TALK

Abstract

Forensic anthropology is a specialized field that utilizes the principles of biological anthropology to analyze skeletal remains in medicolegal settings. This typically includes evaluating forensic significance, estimating biological profile parameters (e.g., biological sex, age, population affinity, stature), interpreting skeletal trauma, assessing pathology and taphonomy, and identifying anatomical anomalies. Although this work is commonly viewed as constrained to death scene response and laboratory analysis, the medicolegal context is in fact expansive and requires a critically engaged, holistic approach that is informed by both theory and practice. Rather than focus on analytical techniques, this presentation will provide an overview of the range of roles forensic anthropologists carry out in a medical examiner’s office, emphasizing the importance of a humanitarian approach. This perspective is crucial not only for daily casework and identification initiatives, but also for effective mass fatality response.

Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, University of Washington

“A Deep History of Human Activity in the Jiuzhaigou National Park”

Friday, November 8, 2024

4:30 PM – 6:30 PM EST

Faculty House

To RSVP, please visit the Tang Center for Early China’s website for further information.

China’s tuigeng huanlin, or “Returning Farmland to Forest” program, has been widely praised as a major contributor to China’s dramatic increase in forest cover. To preserve the biodiversity found in the Jiuzhaigou National Park, and believing that the history of human impact inside the park was relatively short, authorities decided to minimalize human impact, re-settling nine villages of Sharkhog Tibetans. For the Sharkhog Tibetans, these narratives are at odds with their own social-landscape knowledge of the region. In this talk, I present the preliminary results from our International Collaborative Archaeological Project at the Ashaonao site in the JNNR, which challenges assumptions of shallow time depth of human occupation in the region and shows that rather than harming local biodiversity, intermediate levels of disturbance created by small scale farming, pastoralism, and tree cutting have contributed to the biodiversity of this region and have done so over the course of the past 5000 years.