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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology pp 1–4Cite as

Sex Assessment

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Introduction

The estimation of the sex of a deceased person from an analysis of skeletal remains is one of the first procedures undertaken by anthropologists and osteologists as the sex of a person affects other analyses such as estimation of ancestry and age at death (e.g., Rowbotham 2016). In forensic cases, the estimation of sex is pivotal in contributing to the identification of unknown bodies as determining whether the individual is male or female halves the number of possible matches.

Definition

The sex of an individual is a biologically determined variable and differs from the gender of a person which is a social construct (e.g., Agarwal and Wesp 2017).

Key Issues

Age of the Individual

There has been considerable research undertaken on estimating the sex of an individual from the examination of juvenile skeletal remains (e.g., Bilfeld et al. 2013; Cunningham 2014). However, estimating the sex of individuals who have not reached puberty is limited because in most cases the...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forensic Medicine, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine/Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Soren Blau

Authors
  1. Soren Blau
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Soren Blau .

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Forensic Medicine, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine / Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Soren Blau

  2. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Luis Fondebrider

  3. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA

    Douglas H. Ubelaker

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Blau, S. (2018). Sex Assessment. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_140-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_140-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51726-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51726-1

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