A New Tool for Forensic Geoarchaeology: Sediment Fingerprinting with Geochemistry for Homicide Investigations

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Forensic Archaeology: Research & Practice" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sediment fingerprinting by elemental analysis has been an important analytical tool in the environmental sciences to help explain sediment movement and deposition in water bodies and other catchments. Related techniques have also been used in many archaeological investigations to aid in ancient activity area analysis. However, this technique has only been rarely applied in forensic archaeology. This paper discusses methods and two case studies from Florida that use sediment fingerprinting in homicide investigations. In both cases, sediments from the crime scene and the suspect’s vehicle were compared. For the comparison, sediments were digested with strong acids and analyzed with ICP-MS for a range of minor and rare earth elements. The results were analyzed with discriminant function analysis, which provided probabilities for group membership compared to off-site/control samples. This presentation introduces the methods and advocates for the further development and use of this technique in forensic science.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Forensic Archaeology: Research & Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24217