Course Description

This intensive short course provides the opportunity to learn about aspects of the human skeleton through a combination of didactic lectures and interactive hands-on analyses of real human skeletal remains from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine’s (VIFM) osteology collection. The aim of the course is to provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of human skeletal anatomy. This course is beneficial for archaeologists, museum curators, heritage officers, and police officers who may work with skeletal remains; students who are interested in pursuing studies/careers in biological archaeology or forensic anthropology, and medical professionals (i.e., forensic pathologists) who are required to undertake anthropological examinations of skeletal remains. No prior knowledge of human osteology is required. Lectures will be delivered by discipline-specific experts from the VIFM and external organisations. To allow professionals the opportunity to tailor the course to their level of interest, this course is offered in two parts:

PART I (Three days):
Part I provides participants the opportunity to learn how to identify and side each bone in the human body, including dentition and fragmentary remains, and introduces the principles of bone growth and development, and how to differentiate human from non-human bone.

PART II (Two days):
Part II provides participants with the necessary morphologic and metric osteology skills to create a basic biological profile (i.e., estimating age, sex, ancestry, and stature

Course Objectives

At the conclusion of Part I participants will be able to:

• understand the basic principles of bone biology and skeletal growth;
• identify the major anatomical landmarks and key features of each bone;
• side each bone in the human body;
• have a basic understanding of how to distinguish human bones from some of the most common animal bones; and

At the conclusion of Part II participants will be able to:

• understand the basic principles of human variation, and
• reconstruct a basic biological profile (estimation of a person’s sex, age, ancestry and stature from skeletonised remains).