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Postmortem facial identification is one of the most common techniques for establishing a deceased person's identity. In victims suffering from devastating cranial injuries, the feasibility of facial identification tasks can be compromised by damage to or disfigurement of the identifying cranial features. Although there are several reconstructive approaches, which help experts to restore the essence of person's physical appearance, thus enhancing the chances of recognition, only a few of them involve restoring the fractured cranial bones as the foundation for the reconstructed soft tissues. Here, we propose a technique based on replacement of heavily damaged hard tissues with generic prosthetics manufactured by 3D printing. Our approach does not require medical imaging technologies or other costly lab equipment. It is simple, affordable and relatively labor-efficient. The deceased's reconstructed craniofacial features can be subsequently assessed, photographed, drawn or otherwise reproduced in order to help determine his or her identity. In addition, the imagery can be displayed, published or broadcasted in media without concerns of being overly graphic.

Throughout the long history of the Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture in the region of modern Poland (4100–3100 BCE) we can observe how local farming communities interacted with the wild world and how deer species became an important ideological resource for the TRB people. Biomolecular and histomorphometric evidence from two archaeological sites in central Poland add new information for a better understanding of these multi-layered interactions. Our findings fuel a discussion of deer valorisation during the TRB era in Poland, showing that the dagger from Slawecinek was made from the bone of a red deer or elk and may have served as a clan accessory. Furthermore, the results indicate that a likely candidate for the bone used to temper the ceramic vessel from Kaldus is red deer, which allowed us to speculate that the utilisation of bone-tempered pottery by the local TRB farmers may possibly reflect the magical domestication of cervids.

International audience; Dating archaeological mortar by OSL is one of the challenging that allows to date the construction of ancient masonries. Amongst building materials, mortar is more convenient to date masonries than bricks, since the latter can be reused, salvaged from older buildings or structures. The event to be dated is the preparation of mortar when grains of sand (including quartz) were extracted, possibly sieved and added to lime and mixed together. In many cases, an incomplete bleaching of grains is reported in the literature and the only way to overcome this difficulty is to use the single grain technique (Jain et al., 2004; Urbanova et al., 2015…). Nevertheless, despite its potential, this technique needs to develop non-standard statistical tools in order to understand and describe the EDs distribution of poorly bleached materials.The first step of this study is, to model the bleaching process of sand grains during their movement while being mixed with lime and water, in the view of obtaining a residual dose distribution. To do so, we base our calculation upon simple assumptions about the statistical behaviour of grains, and particularly the fact that individual grains can move independently during the making process. Assuming that the probability for a grain to be exposed to the light is memoryless, then we deduced that the time of exposition of a grain follows an exponential distribution. Coupling this exposition with both a bleaching equation of grains which is assumed to be exponential, and a growth function of OSL with dose, chosen in our case as a saturating exponential, we obtain the distribution of residual dose. This distribution is convoluted with the burial dose one (distribution of dose integrated since the mortar manufacture) to simulate distributions of EDs of archaeological materials.The second step consists in checking the suitability of this simulation approach by comparing calculated and experimental distributions of EDs of mortar samples. The principle is to evaluate the parameters involved in the simulation process that best fits the experimental distribution of individual EDs and finally compare the Single Grain -OSL ages with the known ones. As the samples studied here are of known ages, that were determined according to archaeological or other physical dating approaches, it is then possible to evaluate the consistency of this data processing. A very satisfactory agreement is obtained with the known samples studied. We actually experience tens of SG studies that indicate the suitability of the procedure that, in a certain extent, could be generalized to other bleaching processes involving a mobility of grains as a major source of random exposition of grains to the light.Jain, M., Thomsen, K. J., Bøtter-Jensen, L., Murray, A. S., 2004. Thermal transfer and apparent-dose distributions in poorly bleached mortar samples: results from single grains and small aliquots of quartz. Radiation Measurements, 38: 101-109.Urbanova, P., Hourcade, D., Ney, C., Guibert, P., 2015. Sources of uncertainties in OSL dating of archaeological mortars: the case study of the Roman amphitheatre Palais-Gallien in Bordeaux. Radiation Measurements, 72: 100-110.

While assessing skeletal injuries in human skeletal remains, forensic anthropologists are frequently presented with fractured, fragmented, or otherwise modified skeletal remains. The examination of evidence and the mechanisms of skeletal injuries often require that separate osseous elements be permanently or temporarily reassembled or reconstructed. If not dealt with properly, such reconstructions may impede accurate interpretation of the evidence. Nowadays, routine forensic examinations increasingly incorporate digital imaging technologies. As a result, a variety of PC-assisted imaging techniques, collectively referred to as the virtual approach, have been made available to treat fragmentary skeletal remains. The present study employs a 3D virtual approach to assess mechanisms of skeletal injuries, and provides an expert opinion of causative tools in three forensic cases involving human skeletal remains where integrity was compromised by multiple peri- or postmortem alterations resulting in fragmentation and/or incompleteness. Three fragmentary skulls and an incomplete set of foot bones with evidence of perimortem fractures (gunshot wounds) and sharp force trauma (saw marks) were digitized using a desktop laser scanner. The digitized skeletal elements were reassembled in the virtual workspace using functionalities incorporated in AMIRA ® version 5.0 software, and simultaneously in real physical space by traditional reconstructive approaches. For this study, the original skeletal fragments were substituted by replicas built by 3D printing. Inter-method differences were quantified by mesh-based comparison after the physically reassembled elements had been re-digitized. Observed differences were further reinforced by visualizing local variations using colormaps and other advanced 3D visualization techniques. In addition, intra-operator and inter-operator error was computed. The results demonstrate that the importance of incorporating the virtual approach into the assessment of skeletal injuries increases with the complexity and state of preservation of a forensic case. While in relatively simple cases the virtual approach is a welcome extension to a traditional approach, which merely facilitates the analysis, in more complex and extensively fragmentary cases such as multiple gunshot wounds or dismemberment, the virtual approach can be a crucial step in applying the principles of gunshot wounds or sharp force traumatic mechanisms. The unrestricted manipulation with digital elements enabling limitless repairs and adjustments to a “best-case scenario” also produced smaller inter-operator variation in comparison to the traditional approach.

Forensic dental identification has employed traditionally 2D digital radiological imaging techniques. More recently, 3D cone beam computer tomography (CBCT) data, widely applied in clinical dentistry, have been gradually used. The purpose of this study was to compare the precision and quality of 2D digital orthopantomogram (OPG) and 2D OPG images generated from cone beam computed tomography (CBCT). The study sample consisted of 50 patients with archived conventional 2D OPG and 3D CBCT images. Patients signed an informed consent form to take part in our study. Measurements of the mandible, teeth and dental restorations were taken by two observers on calibrated 2D OPG and 3D CBCT-to-OPG images using measurement functionalities of DOPLHIN software. Acquired dimensions were compared side by side and images of fillings were superimposed. For better visual comparison and more efficient image registration, the methods of spline interpolation were used. The pairs of absolute measurements obtained from conventional OPG and CBCT-to-OPG-converted images were highly correlated (p 0.05). However, larger, and horizontally measured distances were revealed to be more affected than shorter vertically taken measurements. In relative terms, CBCT-generated width/length indices of the canines and the first molars ranged from 84% to 99.8% of those acquired from traditional OPGs. In addition, corresponding points on the teeth and fillings were compared side by side and in superimposition. The average coincidence of images was 6.1%. The results revealed that for selected metric variables 2D OPGs and 3D CBCT-generated OPGs were complementary and could be used for forensic comparisons.

Facial image identification is an area of forensic sciences, where an expert provides an opinion on whether or not two or more images depict the same individual. The primary concern for facial image identification is that it must be based on sound scientific principles. The recent extensive development in 3D recording technology, which is presumed to enhance performances of identification tasks, has made essential to question conditions, under which 3D images can yield accurate and reliable results. The present paper explores the effect of mesh resolution, adequacy of selected measures of dissimilarity and number of variables employed to encode identity-specific facial features on a dataset of 528 3D face models sampled from the Fidentis 3D Face Database (N ∼ 2100). In order to match 3D images two quantitative approaches were tested, the first based on closest point-to-point distances computed from registered surface models and the second grounded on Procrustes distances derived from discrete 3D facial points collected manually on textured 3D facial models. The results expressed in terms of rank-1 identification rates, ROC curves and likelihood ratios show that under optimized conditions the tested algorithms have the capacity to provide very accurate and reliable results. The performance of the tested algorithms is, however, highly dependent on mesh resolution and the number of variables employed in the task. The results also show that in addition to numerical measures of dissimilarity, various 3D visualization tools can be of assistance in the decision-making.

In the framework of forensic anthropology osteometric techniques are generally preferred over visual examinations due to a higher level of reproducibility and repeatability; qualities that are crucial within a legal context. The use of osteometric methods has been further reinforced by incorporating statistically-based algorithms and large reference samples in a variety of user-friendly software applications. However, the continued increase in admixture of human populations have made the use of osteometric methods for estimation of ancestry much more complex, which confounds one of major requirements of ancestry assessment - intra-population homogeneity. The present paper tests the accuracy of ancestry and sex assessment using four identification software tools, specifically FORDISC 2.0, FORDISC 3.1.293, COLIPR 1.5.2 and 3D-ID 1.0. Software accuracy was tested in a sample of 174 documented human crania of Brazilian origin composed of different ancestral groups (i.e., European Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, and Japanese Brazilians and of admixed ancestry). The results show that regardless of the software algorithm employed and composition of the reference database, all methods were able to allocate approximately 50% of Brazilian specimens to an appropriate major reference group. Of the three ancestral groups, Afro-Brazilians were especially prone to misclassification. Japanese Brazilians, by contrast, were shown to be relatively easily recognizable as being of Asian descent but at the same time showed a strong affinity towards Hispanic crania, in particularly when the classification based on FDB was carried out in FORDISC. For crania of admixed origin all of the algorithms showed a considerable higher rate of inconsistency with a tendency for misclassification into Asian and American Hispanic groups. Sex assessments revealed an overall modest to poor reliability (60-71% of correctly classified specimens) using the tested software programs with unbalanced individual rates for males and females. The highest and atypically balanced rate of classification for sex assessment was provided by COLIPR software, which reached 78% of correctly assessed crania.

The potential of passive air sampling devices (polyurethane foam disks) to assess the influence of local sources on the quality of the surrounding environment was investigated. DEZA Valasske Mezirici, a coal tar and mixed tar oils processing plant, and Spolana Neratovice, a chemical factory with the history of high production of organochlorinated pesticides (OCPs), were selected as the point sources of PAHs, and OCPs, respectively. Levels of PCBs, OCPs and PAHs were determined for all sampling sites and sampling periods. The study brought useful data about the air concentrations of POPs in the investigated regions. More important, it provided information on the transport and fate of POPs in the vicinity of local sources of contamination useful for the estimation of their influence. Very good capability of passive samplers to reflect temporal and spatial fluctuation in concentrations of persistent organic pollutants in the ambient air was confirmed which makes them applicable for monitoring on the local scale.