Objective
Blunt force trauma (BFT) is one of the most common type of trauma observed in archaeological studies and forensic cases. Often originating from assaults or accidental falls, determining the exact cause is difficult. Accidents are often associated with multiple traumata occurring in different areas of the body, whereas violent acts show directional trauma patterns. The study of skeletal trauma significantly hampered by insufficient methods to differentiate accidents from assaults.
The research will take place under supervision of Prof. Jankauskas, a very experienced forensic anthropologist and bioarchaeologist, at the faculty of medicine at Vilnius University (LT). Based on 500 recent trauma cases from the US, this project will establish new protocols for the analysis of BFT. Trauma frequencies all over the body and features of traumata will be evaluated to identify discrimination factors for the distinction between accidents and assaults. In the second stage, the developed methods will be applied to archaeological samples presenting high frequencies of BFT which will provide new insights into, assaults, accidents, and child abuse in prehistory and will allow to interpret societal changes in the past related to climate change, frailty and famines.
Training opportunities and a two-way-knowledge transfer of hands-on forensic case work, trauma & palaeopathological analyses will bring urgently needed know-how to Austria and will provide networking opportunities for new methods for VU, e.g. peptide analyses.
This is the first study which analyzes BFT patterns on a large scale to develop new methods for the interpretation of trauma in the past. A systematic evaluation of osteological traumata on a large recent sample has rarely been performed in anthropological studies which makes an interpretation of traumata in cases with unknown contextual data (e.g. in bioarcheological samples) difficult.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistoryprehistory
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomolecules
- social sciencessociologysocial issuessocial inequalities
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
01513 Vilnius
Lithuania