An osteological revisitation of autopsies : comparing anthropological findings on exhumed skeletons to their respective autopsy reports

When anthropologists study skeletons they also try to reconstruct trauma and cause of death, a challenging task since it is difficult to envisage from the skeleton how the entire cadaver, with its soft tissues, appeared: where the skin lesions were in cases of trauma, how the organs were affected, how the skeleton relates to all these variables, how taphonomy influences bone lesions. Certainly, the op- portunity to examine the skeletal remains of individuals of whom detailed autopsy reports are available can be of extreme interest for the forensic anthropologist. For this reason the authors set out to perform a study on a known modern skeletal population, in observance of Police Mortuary Regulations: for many of these skeletons autopsy reports were available