Preface for Professors

This workbook is a humble attempt at solving a problem that many Biological Anthropology Laboratory instructors are facing, especially if teaching more than one college at a time.
Most institutions of higher education differ from one another by numerous factors including availability of proper laboratory space and setup, equipment, paleoanthropological casts, non-human and human skeletal remains. This basic workbook is written with that problem in mind and is tailored towards generalized use. Each laboratory exercise is as generic as possible providing much needed capacity for maneuver by instructor. These activities are created to be easily adopted to various laboratory settings and enhance learning without significantly affecting the quality of work required to satisfy the course outline. These laboratory activities are either highly specialized or generic and the approach will vary based on instructors’ preferences and more importantly availability and quality of the materials and equipment available.

This basic workbook is an OER, and therefore it is free for students and professors. The workbook is intended for a lower division undergraduate course and therefore, specialized terminology is suppressed to its minimum. Each laboratory activity follows lectures which are envisioned to provide additional detailed information (already mostly or partially covered in a textbook assigned by a professor for Biological Anthropology theory only course) regarding scheduled topics to be covered in the laboratory by offering further and in-depth guidance needed for the laboratory setting. Instructors who teach this course are very much aware of the fact that there are numerous different approaches that one can take in order to cover most of the topics related to the osteo-dental analysis. This basic workbook focuses on students’ hands on approach. I only have the highest respect for all the authors who committed numerous weeks, months or even years researching and then preparing publications which are the cornerstones of this rapidly growing science. Nevertheless, many years of lab instruction, in some cases in more than one college at a time, have influenced my current tactic to this basic workbook. I have decided to provide generalized approach which unfortunately excludes any specific methodologies. This is especially evident in Anthroposcopy and Anthropometry portion of this basic workbook as I am attempting to acknowledge and accommodate above explained problems associated with access to materials and equipment. I am, however, counting on fellow instructors to respectively give much deserved credit to authors whose research finds and conclusions they decide to select for their laboratory activities.

Maria Jelaca, PhD