Estimating Age-at-Death Infants and Juveniles (non-adults)

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.