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Estimating Age-at-Death Infants and Juveniles (non-adults)
Estimating age-at-death from children, or non-adult remains requires different techniques from adults. Watch Dr Rebecca Gowland explain more.
In this section we’re going to focus on estimating the age-at-death of non-adult skeletal remains, or infant and juvenile skeletal remains. During this growth period, there’s a huge number of changes regularly happening in the skeleton. As a result, we can usually use these changes to establish a fairly reliable chronological age estimate.
There are three broad categories of technique that we use. These include:
- Dental development and eruption
- Long bone growth
- Skeletal maturity indicators (the appearance of ossification centres and the fusion of the epiphyses- unfused ends of bone that permit growth)
Read about these techniques in further detail in the next article. Then practice and consider the techniques in the discussion.
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