Estimation of Sex by Discriminant Function Analysis for Maya Skeletal Remains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The poor preservation of skeletal remains in the Maya region creates a pressing need for alternative approaches to determine skeletal sex, especially when the pelvic and cranial morphoscopic features traditionally used to determine skeletal sex are fragmentary or absent. Discriminant functions are statistical tools that utilize measurements of skeletal robusticity to classify sexual dimorphism and estimate sex, and are particularly useful when working with fragmentary remains. This study builds upon the corpus of previous discriminant functions generated from long bone measurements by adding equations based on measurements of patellae, tali, and calcanei from Maya sites in Central and Northern Belize and Copan, Honduras. Together, these functions represent a reliable resource enabling researchers to quickly and accurately estimate sex from fragmentary Maya skeletal remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53200