Isis Dwyer

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: It is widely recognized that African and African-descendant populations display the highest levels of genetic and morphological diversity between and among ethnic and geographic groups, yet bioanthropological methods continue to construct Black people of the Americas as a homogenous racial group. Towards challenging this typology, the funded project identified two objectives: characterizing patterns of cranial variation and evaluating the efficacy of current forensic methods among a contemporary sample of Black and African American individuals. Funding allowed the grantee to compile and analyze a consented study sample (N=106) of self-identified Black and African American individuals across the south and southwestern United States, and Kingston, Jamaica. Findings demonstrate distinct regional distributions of inter-individual variation, and reduced accuracy of forensic methods in individuals with morphologies that are currently under-represented in the reference data. In sum, these findings support the notion that the morphological homogeneity observed in Black populations of the Americas reflects the constraints of racialized data and methods, rather than the reality of diasporic Black populations. Through partnership with the University Hospital of the West Indies, this project contributes consented reference data for 30 Jamaican individuals towards the development of population-specific methods and further research on craniofacial diversity in Afro-Caribbean populations.