What is "osteometry"

n. (context anatomy English) The measurement of the bones of the skeleton (both human and animal)

Osteometry is the study and measurement of human or animal skeleton, especially in an anthropological or archaeological context. In Archaeology it has been used to various ends in the subdisciplines of Zooarchaeology and Bioarchaeology.

In zooarchaeology the main goal of osteometry is taxonomic determination and, to lesser extent, determination of sex. Usually it is very difficult to discriminate between different species of the same genus or family (e.g. South American camelids), and the statistical analysis of osteometric parameters is quite useful.

In bioarchaeology, osteometry is very useful to solve many anthropological problems about past human populations, for example, it may be used to determine kinship, sex, the degree of sex dimorphism (which may be used to answer questions related to lack of nutrition) and even ethnicity. There are many problems around the interpretation of osteometric data: loose replicability of the measurements, problems relative to the phenotypic variations between subpopulations of one species, etcetera.