Included in these accounts are Ubetaker's own significant contributions to his discipline, particularly his work on facial reproduction by computer techniques and photographic or radiographic superimpositions. Each case illustrates the steps of forensic human identification procedures in a vivid way that allows the dead to reveal aspects of their life histories and the circumstances of their demise. These authors provide in exciting approach as Ubelaker reviews his many and varied forensic cases, most of which have come to him at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, where he is curator of anthropology and collaborates with the FBI.

In less skillful hands, an account of procedures to determine sex, age at time of death, stature as evidenced by appendicular bones, racial ancestry, markers of individuation acquired through trauma and disease, and other components of the protocol of a forensic anthropological analysis might be arid and technically detailed reading. Sometimes their last words speak not just for the life of the victim but for society, and we ignore them at our peril.' Bones: A Forensic Detective's Casebook, co-authored by the freelance journalist Henry Scammell, describes the analytical procedures used by anthropologists specializing in the identification of human skeletons or decomposed remains for medical-legal investigations. Douglas Ubelaker, a forensic anthropologist with over 20 years of field and laboratory experience, observes that the scientific examination of human remains evokes 'an awareness that they represent the victim's last chance to be heard, to reveal a major insight into how a person lived and perhaps into how he or she died.

Mortal Remains by Henry Scammell