Bioarchaeology Labs

Sheilagh Brooks Osteology Research Lab

The Bioarchaeology Program has a large museum- and research-quality storage facility where skeletal collections are housed named after Dr. Sheilagh Brooks who was one of the first bioarchaeologists hired at UNLV in the 1960s. Sheilagh and her husband Richard (both now deceased) traveled the world doing field work together and their legacy to the department is the many skeletal collections permanently housed there. The collections are from historic and forensic contexts. In addition to this, Sheilagh obtained a large donated skeleton collection of bone elements from the Smithsonian that is from individuals who lived in the early 1900s.

Bioarchaeology of Violence Research Lab

This lab is dedicated to graduate student projects and houses a large collection of teaching casts of trauma, fractures, bone wounds and paleopathology.

Osteology and Biological Anthropology Teaching Lab

This lab has a large teaching collection of casts used in teaching courses on early hominins, human variation, forensic anthropology, osteology and other subdisciplines within biological anthropology.

Current Research Projects, Debra Martin, Principal Investigator

This study draws on 50 years of lethal firearm homicide data from the Clark County Coroner and Medical Examiner Office (CCCMEO) in southern Nevada that serves the large metropolitan city of Las Vegas as well as a few bedroom communities and historic towns. The data being collected comes from a variety of reports kept by the CCCMEO since 1966 including the pathologist and coroner report, the investigative team report, interviews with family and friends of the deceased, and other medical and forensic documentation. While almost all prior studies rely on basic demographic data such as age at death, sex, ethnicity and economic and employment status, much of the rich, nuanced information in those files remains unutilized. Using an anthropological approach to the reports and narratives, key aspects of the victims of lethal firearm violence will be collected in order to understand the life history and lived experience of the victims prior to death. Using an innovative methodology from anthropology to systematically collect thematic information from narratives will permit a contextualized profile of the victims so that larger patterns of risk and vulnerability can be better understood. Finally, the data will be interpreted using a theoretical approach that emphasizes the integration of direct (physical) violence with the institutional and structural aspects of society that influences things like inequality and differential access to resources for subgroups within the larger society. This large body of quantitative and qualitative data from 50 years of firearm deaths will provide a unique insight into when, how and where victims are most vulnerable, and there point to places for intervention and prevention. The contextualized profiles will contain more accurate information on factors other than demography that shape patterns of firearm violence because there will be information on home life, education, prior nonlethal violent episodes, religion, beliefs, politics, health and well-being and other information gleaned from interviews with family and relatives as well as investigators and law enforcement. These contextualized profiles of the victims of firearm violence have the potential to clarify with more specificity places for prevention or intervention, thus sparing lives.

Anthropology Department of Anthropology

Anthropology

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