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7 Biohistory and Cranial Morphology A Forensic Case from Spanish Colonial Georgia Christopher M. Stojanowski and William N. Duncan As several chapters in this volume have shown, skulls are collected from ancestors and enemies, insiders and outsiders, men, women, and children, and used for an array of purposes with numerous connotations (see also chapters in Bonogofsky 2006). Thus, it is not surprising that forensic anthropologists and bioarchaeologists frequently encounter isolated examples in a variety of contexts other than criminal investigations and archaeological sites. Skulls are found in homes (as family heirlooms), in museums, in pawnshops , and on eBay (Huxley and Finnegan 2004; Murad and Murad 2000; Steadman 2003; Willey and Leach 2003). They are collected as war trophies (Sledzik and Ousley 1991), traded as curiosities and as art, and sold for classroom instruction. This ephemeral, symbolic valuation directly translates into the unfortunate commercial value of human remains; skulls are always the most expensive element of the human body. While the people collecting human skulls may do so for a variety of reasons, ranging from ritual purposes to morbid novelty, the skulls are also significant to the societies from which they were taken because they often reflect acts of violence. Sometimes the destruction of an object can give it additional meaning and even sacred status . Taussig (1999) calls this type of violence defacement. It may occur to a variety of objects, but humans and human remains are common targets. For example, Geronimo’s remains would have been sacred to his descendants under any circumstances, but the rumor that they were taken and held by the Skull and Bones fraternity turns their potential sacrality into a kinetic one. The point is that isolated skulls are by definition divorced from their original contexts, and that divorce oftentimes animates the latent symbolic potency of such skulls for the relatives of the deceased. Thus, returning the remains to the nearest kin or native culture is one of the basic goals for anthropologists in such cases. As a result, one of the fundamental questions we must 180 Christopher M. Stojanowski and William N. Duncan address when presented with isolated skulls is one of population affinity. By this we mean affinity in both its broadest (temporal and geographical affinity to specific biological populations) and its narrowest (positive identification of an individual) senses. How, then, can we identify the population to which a recovered skull is most similar so that we might return it to the appropriate descendant community? This is a particularly important question when the deceased are far removed in time or when circumstances make individuation impossible, and it is an extremely difficult one to answer. Because of this articulation with descendant communities, returning remains to the appropriate interest group is one of the most important and rewarding aspects of forensic practice. One common way of dealing with isolated skulls is to compare them to a preexisting data framework, such as the Howells database (Howells 1989, 1995), or to use Fordisc (Jantz and MooreJansen 1988; Ousley and Jantz 1996, 1998), a program that applies multivariate statistical analysis to allocate unknown crania to predetermined comparative population samples. The shortcomings of such analyses have been documented and debated (Belcher et al. 2002; Campbell and Armelagos 2007; Freid et al. 2005; Naar et al. 2006; Williams et al. 2005), but no alternatives have been proposed. The impasse seems to focus on the use of the program itself and how best to interpret its results rather than advancing the method in a manner that considers the recent evolutionary history of craniofacial form. Human crania have demonstrated significant change within populations in as little as a single generation (Gravlee et al. 2003a, 2003b), such that collapsing time periods may not provide the most accurate results. Similarly, substituting one sample for another within a folk taxonomy of “social races” is problematic , for various methodological and theoretical reasons, as opponents of forensic anthropology have been quick to point out (Armelagos and Van Gerven 2003; Goodman 1997; Goodman and Armelagos 1996; Smay and Armelagos 2000). In this chapter, we describe our attempt to assess population affinity of a calvaria (Fort King George 121) that has been attributed to a sixteenth-century priest killed and beheaded in coastal Georgia during Spanish occupation of the region (figure 7.1). This individual, Fray Pedro de Corpa, along with four other priests killed during the same rebellion, is being considered for canonization by the Catholic Church (Harkins 1990), and our efforts at population affinity assessment speak directly to...

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