Less Is More: Three Traits to Reveal a More Accurate Aging Method

Recently a new strategy for age-at-death estimation has been developed. In Stephanie Calce’s 2012 article, ‘A New Method to Estimate Adult Age-at-death Using the Acetabulum,’ she redesigns the previous attempts made by Rissech et al. (2006). Her technique simplifies Rissech et al. seven traits by condensing them into three easily identifiable traits. The aim of this paper is to determine that Calce’s original intent to create a more user-friendly and comprehensible scoring method was successful. My focus is to reveal if Calce’s technique is effective between different populations or whether interpopulation variation renders it an unstable approach to age estimation. I tested Calce’s forensic method of aging human skeleton’s on a random sample of skeletons of known age from the Hamann-Todd collection. In the test, Calce’s method proved to work well. As it is simpler than previously proposed methods, investigators should consider adopting it under appropriate circumstances.