Virtual anthropology: Forensic applications to cranial skeletal remains from the Spanish Civil War.

Biological and forensic anthropologists face limitations while studying skeletal remains altered by taphonomic alterations and perimortem trauma, such as in remains from the Spanish Civil War. However, virtual anthropology techniques can optimize the information inferred from fragmented and deformed remains by generating and restoring three-dimensional bone models. We applied a low-cost 3D modelling methodology based on photogrammetry to develop novel forensic applications of virtual 3D skull reconstruction, assembly, restoration and ancestry estimation.

A urinary stone from the early medieval site of Riner, Catalonia.

Objective: This paper presents the differential diagnosis of a calcified mass found in the pelvic cavity of an adult male dating to the 10th century AD.

Materials: Skeletal remains of an adult male exhumed from the cemetery associated with the early medieval church of Riner (Solsonès, Catalonia).

Methods: The structure and composition of the mass were examined by x-ray imaging, microscopic stereoscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectrometry analysis.

Arteriosclerosis in paleopathology. Are macroscopic findings well known?

Although clinical atherosclerosis is fairly common, it is a surprisingly uncommon finding in anthropology. Several cases have been reported in the anthropological literature but most of them are referred to X-ray studies and to computerized tomographic imaging but, as far as we know, no macroscopic findings useful to anthropologists have been published before. We present a case of an adult male skeleton scattered on a wooded area with remains of partially mummified soft tissues between right tibia and fibula in which macroscopic findings showed a cylindrical structure that could be confused with a root or a branch.