Lucile Hoyme Physical Anthropology

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In 1953, Lucile E. Hoyme published an article entitled “Physical anthropology and its instruments: An historical study.” She asserted, “Measurement is the oldest and most distinctive hallmark of the physical anthropologist” (Hoyme, 1953: 409). By this she meant absolute and relative size measurements of the human body, which she argued was core methodology within physical anthropological investigations. The roots of this core methodology, when applied systematically to human remains, can be traced to comparative studies that began at the turn of the eighteenth century at the University of Edinburgh. Following such early precursors, scholarship associated with the influential Socie´te´ d’ Anthropologic de Paris (1859) included Paul Broca’s prolifi …show more content…

Systematic cranial shape comparisons and constructing typologies generated through such methods have a history as long as that of cranial measurement, extending into the eighteenth century (Cook, 2006). During the nineteenth century, careful observations without measurement also characterize reports by medical doctors and anatomists of osseous cultural modifications and evidence of ancient disease. As Cook and Powell (2006) emphasize, early nineteenth-century scholars such as Warren and Morton, focused on cranial morphology rather than on disease per se, but as the century matured, so did an interest in pathological conditions. Other types of nineteenth century observations used to infer ancient life ways through the direct observation of human osseous and dental tissues include the use of nonmetric traits, such as the Inca bone, to estimate population …show more content…

Joseph Jones (1876), for example, used histological techniques to examine the internal structure of diseased bones recovered from Tennessee’s stone box graves. He also experimented with hydrochloric acid as a means of assessing antiquity and relative age of these remains. Ancient teeth had been studied as early as 1892 (Tomes, cited in Rose and Burke, 2006). Within a year of Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery (1895), X-rays were used to investigate mummies of a cat and human child (Aufderheide,

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