As such, it is not entirely clear how accurate commonly used methods/traits as assessed on recent material are for estimating sex for skeletal material predating the industrial period.ĪAccuracy rate when ambiguous scored as incorrect. Even for modern and postmedieval samples, there are discrepancies in accuracy rates (see Table Table1). Both differ significantly in lifestyle and nutrition to preindustrial communities. Specifically, in the development of sex estimation standards 20th century individuals have been heavily utilized (e.g., the Herman‐Todd, William Bass, and the Terry collections), which also includes war‐dead samples (e.g., Korean War and Balkan conflict) that are biased toward a selected groups of individuals either by sex, or fitness to serve in the military. This issue is highlighted in research where some methods or sexually dimorphic features appear accurate in one population, but not for others (e.g., Maat, Mastwijk, & Van der Velde, 1997 MacLaughlin & Bruce, 1990 Spradley & Jantz, 2001 Walker, 2005). While macroscopic methods currently used to estimate sex in archaeological remains are accurate when tested on postmedieval (1485–1800) and modern (1800 onwards) known‐sex individuals (e.g., Đuric, Rakočević, & Đonic, 2005 Lewis, Heather, & Gavin, 2016 Listi & Bassett, 2006 Mays & Cox, 2000 Meindl, Lovejoy, Mensforth, & Don Carlos, 1985 Thomas, Parks, & Richard, 2016 Ubelaker & Volk, 2002 Williams & Rogers, 2006), it could be argued that this high level of accuracy may reflect the fact that the populations tested are temporarily similar, or even the same collections used to create the methods.Ĭoncerns over the relevance of trends drawn from post‐/industrial samples to material from other periods and locations has been raised (Ubelaker, 2008 Walker, 2008), because of the fact that sexual dimorphism varies between groups due to differences in growth and development, disease (Ubelaker & DeGaglia, 2017), activity patterns (Krishan et al., 2016), general secular trends (Godde, 2015), and genetic admixture.
Furthermore, in many societies biological sex is important in gender construction which is often a key aspect of social organization (Sofaer, 2005). As there are differences in the growth, development, form, and senescence between the sexes, knowledge of an individual's sex is usually required prior to analysis of other biological features, including age, stature, and disease presence. Estimating biological sex from human skeletal remains is fundamental to most bioarchaeological research (Brickley & Buckberry, 2017).
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