Sm. Sri. Med. Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 107-111, 1992 0277-9536192 S.docx

Sm. Sri. Med. Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 107-111, 1992 0277-9536192
S5.00 + 0.00
Printed in Great Britain Pergamon Press plc
FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF
RACE: IF RACES DON’T EXIST, WHY ARE FORENSIC
ANTHROPOLOGISTS SO GOOD AT IDENTIFYING THEM?
NORMAN J. SAUER
Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, East
Lansing, MI 48824, U.S.A.
Abstract-Most anthropologists have abandoned the concept of
race as a research tool and as a valid
representation of human biological diversity. Yet, race
identification continues to be one of the central
foci of forensic anthropological casework and research. It is
maintained in this paper that the successful
assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of
the race concept, but rather a prediction
that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular
socially constructed ‘racial’ category. A
specimen may display features that point to African ancestry. In
this country that person is likely to have
been labeled Black regardless of whether or not such a race
actually exists in nature.
Key words-forensic anthropology, race, race identification,
human variation
Several years ago, I was approached by the Michigan

State Police for assistance with the identification of a
set of decomposed human remains. The specimen,
obviously human, was discovered in a wooded area
by hunters, reported to police and transported to a
morgue at a local hospital. After a standard anthro-
pological evaluation of the material I concluded that
the remains represented a Black female, who was
18-23 years old at death and between 5’2” and 5’6”.
The condition of the remains suggested that depo-
sition occurred between 6 weeks and 6 months before
discovery. That information was reported to the
Investigative Resources Division of the State Police
who matched it against Missing person records. In a
few weeks time the remains were positively identified
as representing a Black female, who was 5’3” tall and
19 years of age when she disappeared about 3 months
earlier.
For many anthropologists there currently exists
a dilemma. While most have rejected the traditional
Western notion of race, as bounded, identifiable
biological groups and have renounced its use as
harmful, the race concept as it is understood by
the public continues to be one of the central
foci of forensic anthropological research and
application. Does the fact that forensic anthropolo-
gists are able to correctly guess the race of a subject
from skeletal remains in any way validate the
concept?
THE NON-EXISTENCE OF RACES
In the 1960s C. Loting Brace and Frank Living-
stone presented arguments for the nonexistence of
human races [l, 21. Extending a debate that began a
decade earlier in zoology [I, 31, they argued that the

discordance of traits made defining races on the basis
of more than one or two characters impossible. Since
no human biologist would support such limited
criteria for defining a race, the race concept was
deemed untenable for human populations.
Brace and Livingstone reiterated and elaborated on
their positions in Montagu’s The Concept of Race [4],
a volume that also included contributions by, among
others, Montagu, Hiemaux, Hogben, Erlich and
Washburn, After applying a cluster analysis of traits
to a series of African populations, Hiernaux reached
a conclusion that echoed the sentiments of the other
contributors to the volume:
From whatever viewpoint one approaches the question of
the applicability of the concept of race to mankind, the
modalities of human variability appear so far from those
required for a coherent classification that the concept must
be considered as of very limited use. . . mo dismember
mankind into races as a convenient approximation requires
such a distortion of the facts that any usefulness disappears
]51.
The non-race position was not immediately
embraced by the anthropology community. In fact
the papers by Brace and Livingstone and the volume
by Montagu were only part of a sometimes bitter
controversy waged largely in the pages of Current
Anthropology during the 1960s [l, 2,4,6-lo]. In a
volume of collected papers from a 1966 AAAS
symposium on science and the concept of race, the
eminent geneticist Dobzhansky voiced an opposing
view with his well known quote. “If races did not exist
they would have to be invented. Since they do exist

they need not be invented, they need be understood”
1111.
It is difficult to evaluate the effect that these debates
particularly of the non-race position have had on
today’s physical anthropologists. Was it insignificant?
In a recent review of the history of the race concept
107
108 NORMAN J. SAUER
in American physical anthropology, Brace himself
writes,
the assumption that contemporary human variation can
be understood in terms of ‘racial’ variation, despite some
pointed critiques, sails on without any substantial
change from the time when Hrdlicka and Hooten were
shaping the field into its subsequently recognizable form
t121.
That the non-race arguments made a significant
impact, however, is revealed by the recent work of
Littlefield, Lieberman and Reynolds who maintain
the non-race view is quite alive and well among
physical anthropologists and may even represent the
‘modal position’ [13]. Their research has evaluated
the positions with respect to the existence of race
taken in 58 physical anthropology (including human
evolution) textbooks written between 1944 and 1979.
Of the 42 texts that commit to the question, 17 take

a ‘races do not exist’ position. But, more importantly,
they state:
Although the no-race view was rarely expressed in physical
anthropology texts before 1970, it had become fhe mosf
frequent view by 1975-79, with only one quarter of the
textbooks continuing to argue for the validity of the race
concept [13, p. 6461 (emphasis mine).
In a paper delivered at the 1987 American
Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago,
Lieberman and his colleagues reported that only
about 50% of 147 physical anthropologists surveyed
in the United States agreed with the statement that
“There are biological races within the species Homo
sapiens.” They also pointed out that among cultural
anthropologists, only about 29% agreed with the
races exist position [14].
The debate that followed the 1960s papers by Brace
and Livingstone and the Montague volume and
Brace’s 1982 lament notwithstanding, these studies by
Lieberman, Littlefield, and their coworkers and my
own reading of current literature indicate that most
anthropologists have rejected the notion of races for
human populations. Certainly, very few of today’s
anthropologists explicitly support the traditional
view of human populations being divisible into four
or five major races.
FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE USE OF RACE
Forensic anthropology, the application of the
physical anthropologists’ techniques of human skel-
etal analysis to law enforcement issues, is a young but

growing area of research and applied anthropology.
The physical anthropology section of the American
Academy of Forensic Sciences currently lists about 50
active members in U.S. and Canada, Europe and
Asia. Each year hundreds of instances occur in the
U.S. alone where anthropologists are called upon to
provide expertise to police agencies, medical examin-
ers and attorneys, and many of us testify in courts of
law on a regular basis. Cases involving forensic
anthropology often receive a great deal of media
attention, making it one of the more visible of our
subdisciplines.
Forensic anthropologists are regularly presented
with material ranging from bits of bone, the species
of which a medical examiner or coroner is unable to
identify, to whole, obviously human skeletons in
various stages of decomposition. If human material is
believed to be modern (i.e. died within the last 10 or
20 years), the goal is usually to discover the person’s
identity. Identification is a two stage process. The first
stage involves the construction of a biological profile
and the second is an attempt at a positive match. The
latter ideally involves comparing some individualiz-
ing data from a missing person to similar data
recovered from the skeletal remains, such as dental
records or X-rays. The purpose of the first stage is to
generate a list of missing persons who generally fit the
description of the unknown specimen. This stage is
necessary to create a manageable sample by narrow-
ing down the field of possible victims whose records
may be searched for appropriate identifying data.
The construction of a biological profile customarily
involves traditional anthropological techniques and
data. The categories typically involved are age, sex,

stature and race. A typical report to the medical
examiner might include, among other information,
the following:
Sex: Female
Age: 18-23 years
Height: 5’2”-5’6”
Race: White (Caucasian)
The assessment of these categories is based upon
copious amounts of research on the relationship
between biological characteristics of the living and
their skeletons. The Hamman-Todd Collection,
housed at the Cleveland Museum, and the Terry
Collection, now at the Smithsonian Institution, have
provided the bulk of the data. These are both cadaver
samples that were collected in the first quarter of the
19th century, unique because the data available for
most of the specimens includes, age, sex, living height
and weight, race, and cause of death. Such data
allowed Trotter and Gleser [ 15, 161, for example, to
derive formulae for estimating stature from long
bones, and numerous authors to develop and test
methods for evaluating age at death and sex [17].
Many of the studies that laid the foundations for
race identification from skeletal remains in the U.S.
relied on either the Hamman-Todd or the Terry
Collection. In 1962, Giles and Elliot published a new
discriminant function method for determining race
[18]. They used the Terry collection to obtain skulls
of ‘Blacks’ and ‘Whites’ and the Indian Knoll,
Kentucky, sample for American Indians. Their
technique involves manipulating eight measurements
of the skull with a discriminant function formula that
yields a single quantitative value. The process

requires two dichotomous tests, one to distinguish
between Blacks and Whites and another for
Forensic anthropology and the concept of race 109
American Indians and Whites. In both tests, race is
indicated by whether or not a specimen’s score falls
above or below a predetermined sectioning point
value. Recently Jantz and Moore-Jansen published
an improved set of measurements and functions
based upon the University of Tennessee Forensic
Anthropology Data Base [19]. Howells [20]
contributed an alternative multivariate test which is
more accurate than that of Giles and Elliot or Jantz
and Moore-Jansen, but is much more difficult to
apply. It requires twenty length measurements and six
angles and four special types of calipers [17].
Following Giles and Elliot and Howells, Gill [21],
recently proposed several midface measurements that
distinguish between ‘Whites’ and ‘American Indians’.
A number of other authors [22-271, have provided
data and formulae for racial determination from the
postcranial skeleton. Similar to the methods that
apply to the cranium, these all involve submitting a
series of measurements to an algorithm and basing
judgements about race upon a derived value relative
to some previously determined sectioning point.
Forensic anthropology texts also describe non-met-
ric or anthroposcopic methods of race determination.
According to Krogman and Iscan [25, p. 2721, for
example,

The more typically Negroid has undulating supraorbital
ridges, sharp upper orbital margins, a rounded glabella, a
plain frontonasal junction, and a wide interorbital distance
. . . White skulls have mesa-like supraorbital ridges, blunt
upper orbital margins, a depressed glabella, ‘beetling’ of the
frontonasal junction and a narrow interorbital distance.
Dental observations have also received attention,
particularly the association of shovel shaped incisors
among Asiatics and Native North Americans [28, 11.
How accurate are the estimates that result from
these methods? According to Krogman and Iscan’s
recent text [25, p. 2961, race should be determinable
from skull morphology in 85 to 90% of cases. In
1979, Snow et al. [29], reported that the races of 83%
of a sample of known white and black crania were
accurately assessed with the Giles and Elliot
technique, but that the method worked poorly (1 out
of 7 correct) for American Indian remains. That race
is determinable from the skull and postcranium is
taken for granted among forensic anthropologists, If
such a determination is not possible, the problem is
usually attributed to the incomplete nature of the
remains or mixed ancestry.
DISCUSSION
Physical anthropologists have a problem. While
arguably the majority of us feel that human biological
races do not exist, the assignment of a race to a set
of skeletal remains is a routine part of most forensic
anthropology evaluations. This problem is especially
profound for those of us who feel that debunking the
idea that human biological variation naturally divides

itself into three major groups is an important role for
modem anthropology.
Perhaps if the racial identification practiced by
forensic anthropologists reflected some new sophisti-
cated treatment of gene frequencies more enlightened
than the centuries old popular notion with which we
are all familiar. But modem race identification studies
in forensic anthropology invariably involve some
combination of the Big Three, Black, White and
Asiatic (including American Indian). Three recent
forensic anthropology texts underscore the point:
In many cases there is little doubt that an
individual belonged to the Negro, Caucasian, or
Mongoloid racial stock [30].
Thus the forensic anthropologist uses the term
race in the very broad sense to differentiate what
are commonly known as white, black and yellow
racial stocks [31].
In estimating race forensically, we prefer to
determine if the skeleton is Negroid or non-
Negroid. If findings favor non-Negroid, then
further study is necessary in order to rule out
Mongoloid [32].
Each of these books and others [17,33, for
example], and numerous articles take essentially the
same position: it is usually possible using morpho-
metric and morphoscopic criteria to assign an
unidentified specimen to one of three or four races.
Does the accuracy with which forensic anthropolo-
gists are able to determine whether an individual is

White, Black or Native American from skeletal
remains obviate the race/non-race debate? Is the
practice a validation of the traditional race concept?
My position in this paper is that race identification by
forensic anthropologists has little to do with whether
or not biological races exist. The race controversy in
anthropology is a debate about natural groupings of
human biological diversity, a question of taxonomy.
Forensic anthropologists, when they assign a race
label to a skeleton, are involved in a process that uses
a narrowly defined set of biological variables for a
very specific end, that is, to construct a biological
profile that will match a missing person report.
That the view of human races employed in forensic
anthropology is a non-scientifically established ver-
sion of the Big Three is illustrative. To be of value the
race categories used by forensic anthropologists must
reflect the everyday usage of the society with which
they interact. In ascribing a race name to a set of
skeletonized remains, the anthropologist is actually
translating information about biological traits to a
culturally constructed labelling system that was likely
to have been applied to a missing person. In North
America, for example, people who display certain
skeletal features are likely to have been called Black.
And since the goal in forensic identification cases is
to find agreement between the biological profile
generated from a skeleton to a missing person report,
110 NORMAN J. SALZR
it only makes sense to use the emit categories that are
likely to have been used to describe the missing

person.
The options available for such labeling may
be limited to the categories listed on missing
person forms. For example, the National Crime
Information Center, a centralized data bank for
missing persons and unidentified remains, provides
five options.
Asian (or Pacific Islander)
Black
American Indian (or Alaskan Native)
White
Unknown
The forensic anthropologist’s task is to predict which,
if any, of these options will correspond to the set of
bones they are evaluating. Whether these are cultural,
sociological or biological categories is irrelevant.
Forensic anthropologists may be very good at match-
ing a set of remains to the race label ascribed to a
missing person, but the practice has little if anything
to do with the taxonomic questions about the natural
existence of races.
Some of the confusion about this issue may stem
from an assumption that to identify a specimen as
having ancestors in Africa or Europe, for example, is
tantamount to race identification and a verification of
geographic races. No one who argues against the race
concept denies that human variation exists or claims
that this variation is not systematic. In fact, it is
systematic variation that allows anyone to estimate,
with varying degrees of specificity, a person’s place of

ancestry from their physical features. However, to
identify a person as having ancestors from, say,
Northern Europe does not identify a biological race
of Northern Europeans.
Is this distinction important? Many anthro-
pologists who support a non-race interpretation of
human variation, feel strongly that the dissemination
of the perspective is an important role for anthro-
pology. In fact, at the 1987 Meetings of the
American Anthropological Association a symposium
entitled Human Variation: Informing the Public, was
devoted to just that topic. As evidenced by the
participants and audience at that session, many
anthropologists have incorporated the non-race
perspective into their classes. The fact that forensic
anthropology cases often receive a great deal of
publicity exacerbates matters because anthro-
pologists become the authorities who substantiate the
public view that there are three races of humankind.
Furthermore, our work with law enforcement
officials promotes a communication channel with
personnel who might benefit professionally from
exposure to the notion that perceived races are not
reflections of biological reality. But we “sail on” as
though the question of races was never an issue in
anthropology.
CONCLUSION
Most anthropologists have rejected the concept of
race for human populations both as a research tool
and as a valid representation of biological diversity.
Yet, forensic anthropologists typically include a races
label (Black, White, Mongoloid or Native American)
along with age, sex, and height in their descriptions

of unidentified remains. My contention here is that
such a practice is not a vindication of the traditional
notion that there are four major human races, rather,
it is a prediction, based upon skeletal morphology,
that a particular label would have been assigned to an
individual when that individual was alive. When there
is agreement (which there often is) between the
predicted race label and that which appears on a
missing person report, the likelihood of identification
is improved.
That forensic anthropologists place our field’s
stamp of approval on the traditional and unscientific
concept of race each time we make such a judgement
is a problem for which I see no easy solution. Perhaps
we could avoid the term “race” in our communi-
cations about cases, substituting ‘ancestry’ or some
other word that has less baggage than race. Perhaps
we could be more explicit about the social or cultural
concepts of race. Certainly we can teach the non-
existence of race in the classroom and do our best to
clarify the use of races in forensic anthropology. At
least, however, let us not fall into the trap of accept-
ing races as valid biologically discrete categories
because we use them so often.
I.
2
3.
4.
5.

6.
I.
8.
9.
10.
Il.
12.
REFERENCES
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113-120, 1964.
Livingstone F. B. On the non-existence of human races.
Cum-Anthropol. 3, 279-281, 1962.
Wilson E. 0. and Brown W. L. The Subsoecies concept
and its taxonomic application. .Sysrenm;ic Zoology .2,
97-l II, 1953.
Montagu A. (Editor) The Concepf of Race. Free Press
of Glencoe, New York, 1964.
Hiernaux J. The concept of race and the taxonomy of
mankind. In The Conceot of Race (Edited bv Montanu
A.), p. 43. Free Press df elencoe, ‘New Yo;k, 1964.-
Coon C. S. Comment: On the race concept, by C. L.
Brace. Curr. Anthropol. 5, 314. 1964.
Dobzhansky T. Comment: On the non-existence of
human races, by F. B. Livingstone. Curr. AnfhropoI. 5,
279-280, 1962.
Garn S. Comment: On the race concept. by C. L. Brace.
C’urr. Anlhropol. 5, 3 16, 1964.

Huxley J. Cbmment: On the race concept, by C. L.
Brace. Curr. Anrhropo(. 5, 3 16-317, 196-1.
Montagu A. Comment: On the race concept, by C. L.
Brace. Curr. Amhropol. 5, 317, 1964.
Mead M., Dobzhansky T., Toback E. and Light R. E.
(Editors) Science and Ihe Conrepr of Race, p. 78.
Columbia University Press, New York, 1968.
Brace C. L. The rodts of the race concept in American
physical anthropology. In A HisforT 01 American
Physical Anthropology, 1930-1980 (Edited by Spencer,
F.), pp. I l-29. Macmillan. New York, 1982.
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Littlefield A., Lieberman L. and Reynolds L. Redefining
race: the potential demise of a concept in physical
anthroooloev. Curr. Anrhro~ol. 23. 641-655. 1982.
Lieberman-L., Stevenson ‘B. W:, Reynolds L. T..
Littlefield A., Hallead G. and Nash B. Jr Informing the
public and the disciplines about human variation:
obstacles and alternatives. Paper presented at the
86th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, Chicago, 1987.
Trotter M. and Gleser G. C. Estimation of stature from
long bones of American whites and negroes. Am. J.
PhG. Anthropol. 10, 463-514, 1952. _
Trotter M. and Gleser G. C. A re-evaluation of
estimation of stature based on measurements of stature
taken during life and of long bones after death. Am. J.
Phys. Anthropol. 16, 79-123, 1958.
Stewart T. D. Essentials of Forensic Anthropology.
Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, 1979.
Giles E. and Elliot 0. Race identification from cranial
measurements. J. Forensic Sci. 7, 147-157, 1962.
Jantz R. L. and Moore-Jansen P. H. A Data Base for
Forensic Anthropology: Slructure, Conlenr and Analysis.
Report of Investigations.
Howells W. W. Multivariate analysis for the identifi-
cation of race from the crania. In Personal Idenrification
in Mass Disasters (Edited by Stewart T. D.),
pp. 111-121. American Museum of Natural History,
Washington, D.C., 1970.
Gill G. W. A forensic test for a new method of
geographical race determination. In Human [email protected]
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Rathbun T. A. and Buikstra J. E.), pp. 329-339. Charles
C. Thomas, Springfield, 1984.
DiBennardo R. and Taylor J. V. Multiple discriminant
and the concept of race 111

function analysis of sex and race in the postcranial
skeleton. Am. J. Phys. Anfhropol. 61, 305-314, 1983.
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sexing the sacrum. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 49, 103-I 10,
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Iscan M. Y. Assessment of race from the pelvis. Am. J.
Phys. Anfhropol. 62, 205-208, 1983.
Krogman W. M. and Iscan M. Y. The Human Skeleton
in Forensic Medicine, 2nd edn. Charles C. Thomas,
Springfield, 1986.
Stewart T. D. Anterior femoral curvature: its utility for
race identification. Hum. Biol. 34, 49-62, 1962.
Walensky N. A. A study of anterior femoral curvature

in man. Anafom. Rec. 151, 559-570, 1965.
Lasker G. W. and Lee M. M. C. Racial traits in human
teeth. J. Forensic Sci. 2. 401419. 1957.
Snow C. C., Hartman S, Giles E.‘and Young F. A. Sex
and race determination of crania by calipers and
computer: a test of the Giles and Elliot discriminant
functions. J. Forensic Sci. 24, 448460, 1979.
El-Najjar M. Y. and McWilliams K. R. Forensic
Anthropology: The Structure, Morphology and Variation
of Human Bone and Den&ion, p. 72. Charles C.
Thomas, Springfield, 1978.
Skinner M. and Lazenby R. A. Found Human Remains:
A Field Manual for the Recovery of the Recent Human
Skelefon, p. 47. Simon Fraser University, Archaeology
Press, Burnaby, British Columbia, 1983.
Morse D., Duncan J. and Stoutamire J. (Editors)
Handbook of Forensic Archaeolopv. o. 89. Bill’s Book
Store, Tallahassee, 1983. -. -
Reichs K. J. (Editor) Forensic Osteology: Advances in
the Identification of Human Remains. Charles C.
Sm. Sri. Med. Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 107-111, 1992 0277-9536192
S5.00 + 0.00
Printed in Great Britain Pergamon Press plc
FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF
RACE: IF RACES DON’T EXIST, WHY ARE FORENSIC
ANTHROPOLOGISTS SO GOOD AT IDENTIFYING THEM?
NORMAN J. SAUER
Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, East

Lansing, MI 48824, U.S.A.
Abstract-Most anthropologists have abandoned the concept of
race as a research tool and as a valid
representation of human biological diversity. Yet, race
identification continues to be one of the central
foci of forensic anthropological casework and research. It is
maintained in this paper that the successful
assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of
the race concept, but rather a prediction
that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular
socially constructed ‘racial’ category. A
specimen may display features that point to African ancestry. In
this country that person is likely to have
been labeled Black regardless of whether or not such a race
actually exists in nature.
Key words-forensic anthropology, race, race identification,
human variation
Several years ago, I was approached by the Michigan
State Police for assistance with the identification of a
set of decomposed human remains. The specimen,
obviously human, was discovered in a wooded area
by hunters, reported to police and transported to a
morgue at a local hospital. After a standard anthro-
pological evaluation of the material I concluded that
the remains represented a Black female, who was
18-23 years old at death and between 5’2” and 5’6”.
The condition of the remains suggested that depo-
sition occurred between 6 weeks and 6 months before
discovery. That information was reported to the
Investigative Resources Division of the State Police
who matched it against Missing person records. In a
few weeks time the remains were positively identified
as representing a Black female, who was 5’3” tall and

19 years of age when she disappeared about 3 months
earlier.
For many anthropologists there currently exists
a dilemma. While most have rejected the traditional
Western notion of race, as bounded, identifiable
biological groups and have renounced its use as
harmful, the race concept as it is understood by
the public continues to be one of the central
foci of forensic anthropological research and
application. Does the fact that forensic anthropolo-
gists are able to correctly guess the race of a subject
from skeletal remains in any way validate the
concept?
THE NON-EXISTENCE OF RACES
In the 1960s C. Loting Brace and Frank Living-
stone presented arguments for the nonexistence of
human races [l, 21. Extending a debate that began a
decade earlier in zoology [I, 31, they argued that the
discordance of traits made defining races on the basis
of more than one or two characters impossible. Since
no human biologist would support such limited
criteria for defining a race, the race concept was
deemed untenable for human populations.
Brace and Livingstone reiterated and elaborated on
their positions in Montagu’s The Concept of Race [4],
a volume that also included contributions by, among
others, Montagu, Hiemaux, Hogben, Erlich and
Washburn, After applying a cluster analysis of traits
to a series of African populations, Hiernaux reached
a conclusion that echoed the sentiments of the other
contributors to the volume:

From whatever viewpoint one approaches the question of
the applicability of the concept of race to mankind, the
modalities of human variability appear so far from those
required for a coherent classification that the concept must
be considered as of very limited use. . . mo dismember
mankind into races as a convenient approximation requires
such a distortion of the facts that any usefulness disappears
]51.
The non-race position was not immediately
embraced by the anthropology community. In fact
the papers by Brace and Livingstone and the volume
by Montagu were only part of a sometimes bitter
controversy waged largely in the pages of Current
Anthropology during the 1960s [l, 2,4,6-lo]. In a
volume of collected papers from a 1966 AAAS
symposium on science and the concept of race, the
eminent geneticist Dobzhansky voiced an opposing
view with his well known quote. “If races did not exist
they would have to be invented. Since they do exist
they need not be invented, they need be understood”
1111.
It is difficult to evaluate the effect that these debates
particularly of the non-race position have had on
today’s physical anthropologists. Was it insignificant?
In a recent review of the history of the race concept
107
108 NORMAN J. SAUER

in American physical anthropology, Brace himself
writes,
the assumption that contemporary human variation can
be understood in terms of ‘racial’ variation, despite some
pointed critiques, sails on without any substantial
change from the time when Hrdlicka and Hooten were
shaping the field into its subsequently recognizable form
t121.
That the non-race arguments made a significant
impact, however, is revealed by the recent work of
Littlefield, Lieberman and Reynolds who maintain
the non-race view is quite alive and well among
physical anthropologists and may even represent the
‘modal position’ [13]. Their research has evaluated
the positions with respect to the existence of race
taken in 58 physical anthropology (including human
evolution) textbooks written between 1944 and 1979.
Of the 42 texts that commit to the question, 17 take
a ‘races do not exist’ position. But, more importantly,
they state:
Although the no-race view was rarely expressed in physical
anthropology texts before 1970, it had become fhe mosf
frequent view by 1975-79, with only one quarter of the
textbooks continuing to argue for the validity of the race
concept [13, p. 6461 (emphasis mine).
In a paper delivered at the 1987 American
Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago,
Lieberman and his colleagues reported that only
about 50% of 147 physical anthropologists surveyed
in the United States agreed with the statement that

“There are biological races within the species Homo
sapiens.” They also pointed out that among cultural
anthropologists, only about 29% agreed with the
races exist position [14].
The debate that followed the 1960s papers by Brace
and Livingstone and the Montague volume and
Brace’s 1982 lament notwithstanding, these studies by
Lieberman, Littlefield, and their coworkers and my
own reading of current literature indicate that most
anthropologists have rejected the notion of races for
human populations. Certainly, very few of today’s
anthropologists explicitly support the traditional
view of human populations being divisible into four
or five major races.
FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE USE OF RACE
Forensic anthropology, the application of the
physical anthropologists’ techniques of human skel-
etal analysis to law enforcement issues, is a young but
growing area of research and applied anthropology.
The physical anthropology section of the American
Academy of Forensic Sciences currently lists about 50
active members in U.S. and Canada, Europe and
Asia. Each year hundreds of instances occur in the
U.S. alone where anthropologists are called upon to
provide expertise to police agencies, medical examin-
ers and attorneys, and many of us testify in courts of
law on a regular basis. Cases involving forensic
anthropology often receive a great deal of media
attention, making it one of the more visible of our
subdisciplines.
Forensic anthropologists are regularly presented

with material ranging from bits of bone, the species
of which a medical examiner or coroner is unable to
identify, to whole, obviously human skeletons in
various stages of decomposition. If human material is
believed to be modern (i.e. died within the last 10 or
20 years), the goal is usually to discover the person’s
identity. Identification is a two stage process. The first
stage involves the construction of a biological profile
and the second is an attempt at a positive match. The
latter ideally involves comparing some individualiz-
ing data from a missing person to similar data
recovered from the skeletal remains, such as dental
records or X-rays. The purpose of the first stage is to
generate a list of missing persons who generally fit the
description of the unknown specimen. This stage is
necessary to create a manageable sample by narrow-
ing down the field of possible victims whose records
may be searched for appropriate identifying data.
The construction of a biological profile customarily
involves traditional anthropological techniques and
data. The categories typically involved are age, sex,
stature and race. A typical report to the medical
examiner might include, among other information,
the following:
Sex: Female
Age: 18-23 years
Height: 5’2”-5’6”
Race: White (Caucasian)
The assessment of these categories is based upon
copious amounts of research on the relationship
between biological characteristics of the living and
their skeletons. The Hamman-Todd Collection,
housed at the Cleveland Museum, and the Terry
Collection, now at the Smithsonian Institution, have

provided the bulk of the data. These are both cadaver
samples that were collected in the first quarter of the
19th century, unique because the data available for
most of the specimens includes, age, sex, living height
and weight, race, and cause of death. Such data
allowed Trotter and Gleser [ 15, 161, for example, to
derive formulae for estimating stature from long
bones, and numerous authors to develop and test
methods for evaluating age at death and sex [17].
Many of the studies that laid the foundations for
race identification from skeletal remains in the U.S.
relied on either the Hamman-Todd or the Terry
Collection. In 1962, Giles and Elliot published a new
discriminant function method for determining race
[18]. They used the Terry collection to obtain skulls
of ‘Blacks’ and ‘Whites’ and the Indian Knoll,
Kentucky, sample for American Indians. Their
technique involves manipulating eight measurements
of the skull with a discriminant function formula that
yields a single quantitative value. The process
requires two dichotomous tests, one to distinguish
between Blacks and Whites and another for
Forensic anthropology and the concept of race 109
American Indians and Whites. In both tests, race is
indicated by whether or not a specimen’s score falls
above or below a predetermined sectioning point
value. Recently Jantz and Moore-Jansen published
an improved set of measurements and functions
based upon the University of Tennessee Forensic
Anthropology Data Base [19]. Howells [20]
contributed an alternative multivariate test which is

more accurate than that of Giles and Elliot or Jantz
and Moore-Jansen, but is much more difficult to
apply. It requires twenty length measurements and six
angles and four special types of calipers [17].
Following Giles and Elliot and Howells, Gill [21],
recently proposed several midface measurements that
distinguish between ‘Whites’ and ‘American Indians’.
A number of other authors [22-271, have provided
data and formulae for racial determination from the
postcranial skeleton. Similar to the methods that
apply to the cranium, these all involve submitting a
series of measurements to an algorithm and basing
judgements about race upon a derived value relative
to some previously determined sectioning point.
Forensic anthropology texts also describe non-met-
ric or anthroposcopic methods of race determination.
According to Krogman and Iscan [25, p. 2721, for
example,
The more typically Negroid has undulating supraorbital
ridges, sharp upper orbital margins, a rounded glabella, a
plain frontonasal junction, and a wide interorbital distance
. . . White skulls have mesa-like supraorbital ridges, blunt
upper orbital margins, a depressed glabella, ‘beetling’ of the
frontonasal junction and a narrow interorbital distance.
Dental observations have also received attention,
particularly the association of shovel shaped incisors
among Asiatics and Native North Americans [28, 11.
How accurate are the estimates that result from
these methods? According to Krogman and Iscan’s
recent text [25, p. 2961, race should be determinable
from skull morphology in 85 to 90% of cases. In

1979, Snow et al. [29], reported that the races of 83%
of a sample of known white and black crania were
accurately assessed with the Giles and Elliot
technique, but that the method worked poorly (1 out
of 7 correct) for American Indian remains. That race
is determinable from the skull and postcranium is
taken for granted among forensic anthropologists, If
such a determination is not possible, the problem is
usually attributed to the incomplete nature of the
remains or mixed ancestry.
DISCUSSION
Physical anthropologists have a problem. While
arguably the majority of us feel that human biological
races do not exist, the assignment of a race to a set
of skeletal remains is a routine part of most forensic
anthropology evaluations. This problem is especially
profound for those of us who feel that debunking the
idea that human biological variation naturally divides
itself into three major groups is an important role for
modem anthropology.
Perhaps if the racial identification practiced by
forensic anthropologists reflected some new sophisti-
cated treatment of gene frequencies more enlightened
than the centuries old popular notion with which we
are all familiar. But modem race identification studies
in forensic anthropology invariably involve some
combination of the Big Three, Black, White and
Asiatic (including American Indian). Three recent
forensic anthropology texts underscore the point:
In many cases there is little doubt that an
individual belonged to the Negro, Caucasian, or

Mongoloid racial stock [30].
Thus the forensic anthropologist uses the term
race in the very broad sense to differentiate what
are commonly known as white, black and yellow
racial stocks [31].
In estimating race forensically, we prefer to
determine if the skeleton is Negroid or non-
Negroid. If findings favor non-Negroid, then
further study is necessary in order to rule out
Mongoloid [32].
Each of these books and others [17,33, for
example], and numerous articles take essentially the
same position: it is usually possible using morpho-
metric and morphoscopic criteria to assign an
unidentified specimen to one of three or four races.
Does the accuracy with which forensic anthropolo-
gists are able to determine whether an individual is
White, Black or Native American from skeletal
remains obviate the race/non-race debate? Is the
practice a validation of the traditional race concept?
My position in this paper is that race identification by
forensic anthropologists has little to do with whether
or not biological races exist. The race controversy in
anthropology is a debate about natural groupings of
human biological diversity, a question of taxonomy.
Forensic anthropologists, when they assign a race
label to a skeleton, are involved in a process that uses
a narrowly defined set of biological variables for a
very specific end, that is, to construct a biological
profile that will match a missing person report.
That the view of human races employed in forensic

anthropology is a non-scientifically established ver-
sion of the Big Three is illustrative. To be of value the
race categories used by forensic anthropologists must
reflect the everyday usage of the society with which
they interact. In ascribing a race name to a set of
skeletonized remains, the anthropologist is actually
translating information about biological traits to a
culturally constructed labelling system that was likely
to have been applied to a missing person. In North
America, for example, people who display certain
skeletal features are likely to have been called Black.
And since the goal in forensic identification cases is
to find agreement between the biological profile
generated from a skeleton to a missing person report,
110 NORMAN J. SALZR
it only makes sense to use the emit categories that are
likely to have been used to describe the missing
person.
The options available for such labeling may
be limited to the categories listed on missing
person forms. For example, the National Crime
Information Center, a centralized data bank for
missing persons and unidentified remains, provides
five options.
Asian (or Pacific Islander)
Black
American Indian (or Alaskan Native)
White
Unknown

The forensic anthropologist’s task is to predict which,
if any, of these options will correspond to the set of
bones they are evaluating. Whether these are cultural,
sociological or biological categories is irrelevant.
Forensic anthropologists may be very good at match-
ing a set of remains to the race label ascribed to a
missing person, but the practice has little if anything
to do with the taxonomic questions about the natural
existence of races.
Some of the confusion about this issue may stem
from an assumption that to identify a specimen as
having ancestors in Africa or Europe, for example, is
tantamount to race identification and a verification of
geographic races. No one who argues against the race
concept denies that human variation exists or claims
that this variation is not systematic. In fact, it is
systematic variation that allows anyone to estimate,
with varying degrees of specificity, a person’s place of
ancestry from their physical features. However, to
identify a person as having ancestors from, say,
Northern Europe does not identify a biological race
of Northern Europeans.
Is this distinction important? Many anthro-
pologists who support a non-race interpretation of
human variation, feel strongly that the dissemination
of the perspective is an important role for anthro-
pology. In fact, at the 1987 Meetings of the
American Anthropological Association a symposium
entitled Human Variation: Informing the Public, was
devoted to just that topic. As evidenced by the
participants and audience at that session, many
anthropologists have incorporated the non-race

perspective into their classes. The fact that forensic
anthropology cases often receive a great deal of
publicity exacerbates matters because anthro-
pologists become the authorities who substantiate the
public view that there are three races of humankind.
Furthermore, our work with law enforcement
officials promotes a communication channel with
personnel who might benefit professionally from
exposure to the notion that perceived races are not
reflections of biological reality. But we “sail on” as
though the question of races was never an issue in
anthropology.
CONCLUSION
Most anthropologists have rejected the concept of
race for human populations both as a research tool
and as a valid representation of biological diversity.
Yet, forensic anthropologists typically include a races
label (Black, White, Mongoloid or Native American)
along with age, sex, and height in their descriptions
of unidentified remains. My contention here is that
such a practice is not a vindication of the traditional
notion that there are four major human races, rather,
it is a prediction, based upon skeletal morphology,
that a particular label would have been assigned to an
individual when that individual was alive. When there
is agreement (which there often is) between the
predicted race label and that which appears on a
missing person report, the likelihood of identification
is improved.
That forensic anthropologists place our field’s
stamp of approval on the traditional and unscientific
concept of race each time we make such a judgement

is a problem for which I see no easy solution. Perhaps
we could avoid the term “race” in our communi-
cations about cases, substituting ‘ancestry’ or some
other word that has less baggage than race. Perhaps
we could be more explicit about the social or cultural
concepts of race. Certainly we can teach the non-
existence of race in the classroom and do our best to
clarify the use of races in forensic anthropology. At
least, however, let us not fall into the trap of accept-
ing races as valid biologically discrete categories
because we use them so often.
I.
2
3.
4.
5.
6.
I.
8.
9.
10.
Il.
12.

REFERENCES
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Wilson E. 0. and Brown W. L. The Subsoecies concept
and its taxonomic application. .Sysrenm;ic Zoology .2,
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Montagu A. (Editor) The Concepf of Race. Free Press
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Hiernaux J. The concept of race and the taxonomy of
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Dobzhansky T. Comment: On the non-existence of
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Garn S. Comment: On the race concept. by C. L. Brace.
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Mead M., Dobzhansky T., Toback E. and Light R. E.
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Phys. Anthropol. 16, 79-123, 1958.
Stewart T. D. Essentials of Forensic Anthropology.
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Jantz R. L. and Moore-Jansen P. H. A Data Base for
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cation of race from the crania. In Personal Idenrification
in Mass Disasters (Edited by Stewart T. D.),
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Washington, D.C., 1970.
Gill G. W. A forensic test for a new method of
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C. Thomas, Springfield, 1984.
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Morse D., Duncan J. and Stoutamire J. (Editors)
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the Identification of Human Remains. Charles C.
1
What do we mean by “social construct?”
It is common, when first reading the “AAA Statement on
Race,” to
conclude that race is socially constructed and, therefore, does
not really matter — in
other words, to conclude that the point of the “Statement” is
that race isn’t real. This
reading is understandable, reasonable, and completely wrong.
From this reading, a logical
(although, as we will see below, incorrect) assumption is
sometimes made that if we
simply made less of a big deal about race, it would go away.
This notion — the idea that
if one doesn’t “see” race it will cease to matter — is usually
referred to as

“colorblindness.”
This is a common trope in American politics, and one that
Stephen Colbert poked
fun at in a recurring joke on his show, The Colbert Report. The
joke followed a standard
formula: “I don’t see color. In fact, I don’t even see my own
color. People tell me I’m
white, and I believe them because…” with a new reason,
generally based in common
racial stereotypes, supplied each time. At 4:30 in this clip
(http://www.cc.com/video-
clips/9yc4ry/the-colbert-report-toni-morrison) of his interview
with Toni Morrison, for
example, Colbert says, “I don’t see race, OK? I’ve evolved
beyond racism, alright? I
don’t even see my own. People tell me I’m white, and I believe
them, because I haven’t
read any of your books.” The joke (because jokes are always
funnier when you explain
them) is that Colbert, like all Americans, does see race. In the
context of the clip above,
this statement follows a discussion of whether Morrison should
be considered an African-
American author, with Colbert asking what she should be

considered, if not that. The
point is that claims to “colorblindness,” particularly in
American politics, exist in a
2
context in which race and color do matter, often profoundly so.
Colbert is not only aware
of the fact that Morrison is an African-American author, but
objects to the idea that she
might wish to be considered something else.
Nonetheless, this leaves us with several questions: if the
concept of “race” has no
biological reality, how can race matter? If race is “socially
constructed,” why wouldn’t it
be better to simply ignore it? What, in other words, does it
mean to say that race is a
“social construct”?
Is time a social construct?
In class, you discussed the question of whether time is socially
constructed.
Several years ago, I taught a summer class of bright high school
students who, in their

spare time, debated the same question. Several weeks into the
course, some of the
students began to be frustrated by this common topic of
conversation, as the argument,
they felt, didn’t really go anywhere. The students who thought
time was socially
constructed continued to believe it was socially constructed, and
the students who
thought it was “real” had likewise not been convinced. I pointed
out to them that this was
because both groups of students were, in fact, correct. Is time
socially constructed?
Absolutely, yes. But does time have a reality outside of this?
Well, yes, it does.
Let’s consider this more deeply. From an objective point of
view, time passes,
whether we want it to or not. The anthropologist Alfred Gell
(1992: 315) pointed out,
“There is no fairyland where people experience time in a way
that is markedly unlike the
way in which we do so ourselves, where there is no past,
present and future, where time
stands still, or chases its own tail, or swings back and forth like
a pendulum.” Time, in

3
other words, is objectively real. The way we understand time is
socially constructed,
however.
The length of a day is determined by the amount of time it takes
the Earth to
rotate on its axis. Why, though, do we divide that into 24
segments called hours? This
division seems entirely natural to us, but it isn’t. The ancient
Egyptians observed that
during the heliacal rising1 of Sirius, the brightest star (other
than the Sun) in the sky — an
event that coincided more or less with the annual flooding of
the Nile2 — 12
constellations known as “decans” were visible in the sky. The
significance of this period
led to the division of the daily periods of darkness and light
(i.e. night and day) into 12
hours each, one for each of those decans.3 You may be thinking
to yourself that this
actually only works twice a year on the equinox, when day and
night are the same length.

You’re right, but for the most part this didn’t bother anyone.
The solution, for a long
time, was just to divide day and night into 12 segments each,
and accept that the
nighttime hour and daytime hour wouldn’t be the same length,
and would change over
the course of the year. It wasn’t until the development of the
weighted mechanical clock
in the late 13th century AD that people started to prefer to
divide the day into 24 hours of
equal length (Andrewes 2002: 76-77).
1 Heliacal rising refers to a period when a star rises and is
briefly visible on the horizon just before sunrise.
Incidentally, Sirius is also known as the Dog Star, and the fact
that its heliacal rising usually occurred
during the most unpleasant part of summer is the origin of the
term “dog days.”
2 Formerly, the Nile flooded regularly every year during the
summer, and this predictability was critical for
2 Formerly, the Nile flooded regularly every year during the
summer, and this predictability was critical for
Egyptian agriculture. Since the completion of the Aswan High
Dam in 1970, the Nile no longer floods.
3 Perhaps surprisingly, the same thing is true for many units
of time we find to be more or less common

sense. Why, for example, do we have a seven-day week? This
length probably originates in Judaism in the
1st millennium BC, due to the sacredness of the number 7.
There are certain advantages to a seven-day
week, but this isn’t a “natural” division. The ancient Egyptians,
for example, had a 10-day week (Conman
2003: 37).
4
This may sound surprising, but even today we do the same
thing. Consider units
of distance. If you ask most Americans how far away something
is, you are very unlikely
to get a response in units of distance, and will instead very
likely get a response in units
of time. This seems like a strange way of measuring distance,
since something will
always be the same number of miles away, regardless of traffic
conditions, etc. Of course,
this is exactly why one would measure distance in units of time.
For the most part,
Americans care more about how long it will take them to get
somewhere than the
physical distance they are traveling. Socially, then, the amount
of time it will take to get

to a destination under certain conditions is more relevant than
how far away something
actually is, and it doesn’t really bother anyone that if you
measure this way, Los Angeles
is twice as far from San Diego on Thanksgiving morning as it is
at 2 AM on an average
Wednesday. (Actually, that might bother you a lot if you happen
to be traveling to LA on
Thanksgiving, but few Californians would find the concept
troubling.)
Moving back to time, if we take a 24-hour division of the day
for granted, we also
take a 60-minute division of each of those hours for granted.
From that perspective, it
may be surprising to learn that nobody thought to put a minute
hand on a clock until the
end of the 17th century AD (Thompson 1967: 64). Indeed, one
could argue, as Thompson
did, that measuring time to the minute (or second) developed
alongside industrial
capitalism. Your chickens don’t care if you show up 10 minutes
later one day than you
did the day before; a factory owner paying you by the hour
would, though.

It is somewhat strange, for those of us aware of the Apple
Watch, to consider that
until fairly recently, clocks were seen as a symbol of modernity,
and more specifically
modern notions of time. To take one example, in 1907, the
Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid
5
II had a 40-foot-tall clock tower built at Jerusalem’s Jaffa
Gate.4 The clock tower was
meant to show that Jerusalem was a modern city, and the
Ottoman Empire a modern
state. When the British took control of the city after World War
I, most of the colonial
administrators and soldiers tended to feel that the clock tower
was inappropriate in
Jerusalem, which should look the part of a holy and, more
importantly, ancient city, and
it was demolished in 1934 as part of efforts to make the Old
City look, well, old (Baram
2012). An ancient city, in other words, should not advertise that
it moves to a modern,
industrial rhythm.

Moving back briefly to time as a measure of distance, we might
also consider one
particularly important unit of measurement in astronomy: the
light-year, or the distance
that light travels in about 365 days, which comes out to about
9.5 trillion km. This
number is constant, as light always travels at the same speed in
a vacuum. In that sense,
the light-year is an objective measurement. It will always be the
same distance. There’s
nothing natural about this number, though. Light doesn’t care
how far it travels in one
year on Earth, and if we were to meet intelligent life from some
other planet, it’s unlikely
that they would have come to the conclusion that this was an
important unit (the same is
true for other astronomical units of measurement, e.g. the
astronomical unit [AU], the
parsec, etc.).
All of these examples have (hopefully) demonstrated that,
although time is real
and its passage is universal, ways of thinking about time are
culturally specific and
socially constructed. This doesn’t, however, detract from the

reality of these concepts. I
recognize that hours are not a “natural” unit of time, but at the
same time I am bound to
4 The Jaffa Gate is the western entrance to the walled Old
City of Jerusalem. It gets its English and Hebrew
name from the fact that it faces west, toward Tel Aviv (i.e.
Jaffa).
6
take up only 1.5 of those units in each lecture. If I were to go
over time and tell you all
that time is merely a social construct and can therefore be
ignored, you would disagree.
Likewise, if you show up to section 45 minutes late, your TA is
unlikely to accept your
excuse if you say, “Time is just a social construct, so who are
you to say that I’m ‘late’?”
Time may be socially constructed, but it is very much real.
What is a continent?
Without belaboring the point too much (too late, Dr. Jones, too

late…), let’s look
at another example. How are the continents divided? The short
answer is that continents
are socially constructed. It is the case, of course, that the idea
of continents bears some
resemblance to the underlying geological reality of tectonic
plates, but the two concepts
don’t really map onto one another. For one thing, we’ve only
known about tectonic plates
since the mid-20th century, whereas the idea of continents has
been around in one form or
another for millennia. Beyond that, the continents as we
conceive of them don’t actually
correspond to tectonic boundaries, unless you think of Europe
and Asia as being a single
continent (Eurasia) that excludes the Arabian peninsula, India,
eastern Siberia, and half of
Japan (maybe you do; I’m not here to judge). The actual
divisions between continents are
somewhat arbitrary, though. The boundary between Europe and
Asia, for example, is
generally taken to be the Ural Mountains, whose highest point is
a bit lower than 2,000
m. Why, then, are the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada

range, which both reach
heights of more than 4,400 m, not continental boundaries? For
that matter, why are the
Americas divided into northern and southern continents, rather
than eastern and western
ones divided by the American Cordillera, the long series of
mountain ranges running
from the Alaska Range in the north to the Andes and Antarctic
Peninsula in the south?
7
Well, because we don’t divide them that way. Actually,
according to some models they
aren’t divided at all. One of the members of my doctoral
committee was fond of telling
students that, growing up in Iran, he had learned that there were
six continents, one of
which was just America, with no divisions into north or south.
That isn’t to say that the continental divisions don’t mean
anything, though.
Continental divisions have political and economic meanings in
the real world (think of
the European Union or the North American Free Trade

Agreement), as well as social,
cultural, and academic ones (you can, for example, take courses
on European history and
Asian art, whatever those things might be — while academics
might admit that the
division between Europe and Asia is artificial, a course on
“Eurasian art” would, almost
without exception, focus on the Central Asian steppe, not the
whole of Eurasia, oddly
enough).
Back to race
Race is, in this same way, real. Yes, it is the case, as you have
already learned,
that race doesn’t work as a biological concept. In other words,
humans are not neatly
separated into discrete, bounded groups, as the biological
concept of race would suggest.
Race is, however, an important folk taxonomic5 concept that
has real social
consequences. As much as we might like to pretend we don’t
“see” race — indeed, as
much as we might wish we didn’t — the concept is pervasive in
Euro-American culture.

It is there, regardless of whether we want to notice it, and
pretending to ignore it cannot
make it any less real — hence, this course exists.
5 Folk taxonomy refers to the non-scientific classification
systems that people tend to use in daily life. Folk
taxonomy, for example, would consider the tomato a vegetable,
even though we know, scientifically, that it
is a fruit. We can understand, on one hand, that the tomato is
technically a fruit, and also be disappointed,
on the other, if we find it in fruit salad, to misquote Miles
Kington.
8
Works Cited
Andrewes, William J. H. 2002. “A Chronicle of Timekeeping.”
Scientific American 287
(3):76-85.
Baram, Uzi. 2012. “Out of Time: Erasing Modernity in an
Antique City.” Archaeologies
8(3):330-348.
Conman, Joanne. 2003. “It’s about Time: Ancient Egyptian
Cosmology.” Studien zur
Altägyptischen Kultur 31: 33-71.

Gell, Alfred. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural
Constructions of Temporal Maps
and Images. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial
Capitalism.” Past and
Present 38: 56-97.

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Sm. Sri. Med. Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 107-111, 1992 0277-9536192 S.docx