With over 3000 unidentified individuals found in South Africa every year, the work of forensic anthropologists is never done. Our main goal is to assist the Victim Identification Centre of the South African Police Service in finding the identities of the unknown. We, as forensic anthropologists, are usually limited to skeletal analyses and so the usual methods of identification, such as fingerprints, medical and dental records and facial identification are not useful.
Over many years we have worked on creating methods to figure out whether the skeletal remains belong to a male or female, what the ancestry is, how old the individual was at the time of death and how tall he or she once stood. The police then use this information when creating facial reconstructions and when providing information to the public to find out who this person was. The methods we use require comparative samples and statistical validation for us to be able to use them. However, the comparative samples need to be representative of the population on which they are used and so even though a lot of research has already been done in different countries, we cannot use the methods or samples in South Africa unless they have been tested or re-calibrated and shown to work in this extremely diverse country.
While we cannot use the methods or standards created in other countries without further testing, we do often make use of the same measurements and techniques in our work. In the last few years, new measurements and changes to the standard methodology were proposed in the USA; however, we noticed that even though the changes would eventually make analyses easier, applying these changes in individual South African forensic anthropology research centres only would create limited repeatability in results across the country.
This is where the proposal for the Southern African Group for Anthropology, or SAGA, comes in. The idea behind SAGA is that anthropologists from all over South Africa, as well as other Sub-Saharan countries, particularly Zimbabwe, can come together to make decisions regarding the way forward for anthropology in our countries. The SAGA will include researchers from different institutions and research centres that work in the field of anthropology in an attempt to bring all the experiences and knowledge to a central point in Africa. Discussions will include how measurements of bones should be taken, if any new measurements are proposed whether we should adopt them, sharing of databases for analyses and many more interesting and necessary topics.
If you would like to be kept up to date with the latest developments regarding SAGA, please feel free to email us at: bakengSA@gmail.com
Gabi Krüger
Curator of the Pretoria Bone Collection
University of Pretoria