Forensic Archaeology: Integrating Archaeology with Criminalistics and Criminology

Abstract

This chapter suggests a forensic archaeological framework that integrates the archaeological process and research cycle with criminalistic and crimino-logical knowledge. By doing so, it proposes evidential reasoning that is based on the Bayesian inference, physical evidence recovered at crime scenes, middle-range theories, site formation processes, forensic assemblages and mutually exclusive hypotheses. This to analyse, interpret and reconstruct the human (criminal) behaviour and natural processes that have formed and modiied the investigated crime scene. The analysis and interpretation of the recovered forensic record should commence during eld work, at the crime scene. After completing this investigation, the secured physical evidence, as analysed and interpreted by different elds of forensic expertise, should be integrated into one overall synthesis. In addition, a forensic archaeological investigation should not be an end in itself. It should also be used to generate inductive and deductive theories and models needed for reconstructing the human (criminal) behaviour and natural processes responsible for the formation, distortion and destruction of the physical evidence. To be able to do this, feedback from casework is essential, as are development and innovation. To strengthen its base as a scientiic discipline, the chapter closes with a discussion on innovation and development within the eld of forensic archaeology.