Amber Plemons

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Human Identification Lab Supervisor at California State University, Chico

Dental development is one of the most widely utilized and accurate methods available for estimating age in subadult skeletal remains. The timing of tooth growth and development is regulated by genetics and less affected by external factors, allowing reliable estimates of chronological age. Traditional methodology focuses on comparing tooth developm...

Forensic anthropologists assist law enforcement agencies and medical examiner's offices with investigations involving human remains, providing insight into trauma analysis, the establishment of postmortem interval, and the estimation of biological profile data. Ancestry is considered one of the more difficult aspects of the biological profile, due...

Traditional education in biological anthropology relies primarily on hands-on, highly visual experiences. Forensic anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, and osteologists in general should aim to collaborate in developing widespread digital pedagogy suitable for our discipline, increasing digital technologies used for education and training. Considera...

Cranial landmarks have been used in research and casework since the late 19th century, at which time some of the earliest landmark and measurement definitions were codified. Over the last two to three decades, however, many biological anthropologists have shifted from taking traditional caliper-derived measurements to using a three-dimensional (3D)...

If you are interested in participating in the working group to develop a pathway towards ethical digital pedagogy involving human remains, please email us! Amber Plemons - ampl228@uky.edu Micayla Spiros - spirosmi@msu.edu

Objectives Digital tools and imaging are now common practice in biological anthropology research. Ethical concerns around the management, use, and display of digital human remains are a budding topic of discussion. Currently, there are no formalized discipline‐wide guidelines or standards for digital ethics in biological anthropology. To bridge the...

Population affinity explores the biocultural impacts on the human skeletal system using morphological variations to estimate the concordance between an individual and various reference populations. Due to the impact of the environment, geographic boundaries, cultural practices, gene flow, and structural racism (e.g., legal, societal, health care, p...

This presentation will describe stakeholder relationships encountered by forensic anthropologists during the Georgian Recovery, Documentation, and Identification Project (GRDIP). This presentation will impact the forensic science community by describing additional responsibilities and encounters with non-forensic stakeholders involved in humanitari...

Mediante el análisis de rasgos no métricos, la ancestría se puede estimar a partir de restos completos o fragmentados. El método mas utilizado, que se ajusta a las guías de los estándares probatorios, aplica a datos de rasgos macromorfoscópicos (MMS). Estos rasgos se han usado para investigar grupos ancestrales, y se pueden usar para reducir la reg...

Full article now available (https://tinyurl.com/FA-Ethics-Pedagogy). Anyone using the link below before May 22, 2022 will be taken directly to the latest version of this article on ScienceDirect, which they are welcome to read or download. No sign up, registration or fees are required. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1erEk4q6IcubKw

Isoscape refinement is an essential component for accurately predicting region-of-origin in forensic investigations involving isotope analysis of unidentified human remains. Stable oxygen (δ(18) O) and hydrogen (δ(2) H) isotopes were measured from 57 tap water samples collected across Mississippi to model refined isoscapes for the state. A tap wate...

As part of a much larger investigation into the use of macromorphoscopic trait data by forensic anthropologists to estimate ancestry from unidentified skeletal remains, we conducted a fourteen-year (2002-2016) intraobserver error study. Motivated by the development of a large macromorphoscopic database-which will potentially utilize data collected...

The estimation of ancestry in historic skeletal samples and forensic cases from the United States is complicated by diverse population histories of communities. Reference datasets are often temporally varied and geographically limited. Researchers have recognized these limitations and have focused on expanding reference databases to improve assessm...

Anthropologists have a lengthy history using cranial nonmetric traits to assess biological distances between populations. These concepts were adopted by forensic anthropologists to estimate ancestry at the individual level using population-based human variation. However, this method of estimation must adhere to the Daubert guidelines to be applied...

Anthropologists have a lengthy history using cranial nonmetric traits to assess biological distances between populations. These concepts were adopted by forensic anthropologists to estimate ancestry at the individual level using population-based human variation. However, this method of estimation must adhere to the Daubert guidelines to be applied...