A Metrical Method of Sex Estimation for Two Mediaeval Scottish Populations

Calcanei and tali are robust, sexually dimorphic, weight bearing foot bones that survive well in forensic and archaeological contexts. In this study, sex estimations were conducted on calcanei and tali from the Ballumbie and St. Andrews library mediaeval Scottish populations provided by the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, applying the Alonso-Llamazares and Pablos method. This method has proven accuracy of up to 96.4% for the Hamann-Todd human osteological collection, 91.4% for Homo sapiens from data published by other authors and 100.0% for both the Sima de los Huesos hominids and homo neanderthalensis, based on discriminant functions for the calcaneus and talus.

In this study, 39 calcanei from 19 males and 20 females and 56 tali from 25 males and 31 females were used. The functions obtained produced accuracies varying from 67.3%-88.4% for univariate and from 79.1%-100.0% for the multivariate discriminant formulae. This study confirms the finding of Alonso-Llamazares and Pablos that multivariate statistical analysis of the calcaneus and talus combined generally produce more accurate sex estimations than univariate statistical methods. Measurements yielding the highest accuracy for sex estimation were the maximum length of the calcaneus, posterior talar articular surface length of the calcaneus, talar length and total length of the talus. The Alonso-Llamazares and Pablos formulae applied to these two mediaeval populations produced accuracies ranging from 43.9%-89.4% for univariate and from 75.6%-97.1% accuracy for multivariate formulae. The best predictor for sex from both studies was the total talar length (M1a).

Author(s): Danielle Bissonnette*

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