Allocation of crania to groups via the "new morphometry"

Ari investigation regarding the Variation in cranial morphology between Ame rican blacks and whites was conducted using triangulation schemes of inter- landmark distances and converting these to three dimensional coordinate dat a. A least squares. superimposition method and Euclidean distance analysis were utilized to obtain parameters for classifying individuals in our sampl e, consisting of 19 black and nineteen white; crania from the William M. Ba ss, III Denoted and Forensic collections curated at the University of Tenne ssee, Knoxville. Thirty-six caliper measurements were collected on each sku ll based on 14 homologous cranial landmarks (nasion, bregma, lambda, prosth ion, subspinale, basion, frontomalare (left and right), zygoorbitale (left and right), zygotemporale (left and right), and left and right asterion). T he results are compared to traditional discriminant analysis. The classification results using the new morphometry are comparable to trad itional discriminant analysis. However, the new morphometry can provide inf ormation as to the specific location of morphological variation that cannot be obtained with discriminant analysis.