








































Forensic Anthropology Vol. 2, No. 2: 61–64
DOI: 10.5744/fa.2019.1018

© 2019 University of Florida Press

The analysis of commingled human remains (CHR) has 
become increasingly sophisticated. Commingled remains 
analysis in forensic anthropology was historically based on 
the bioarcheology of large Native American ossuaries (Fin-
negan 1976; Stewart 1979; Ubelaker 1978). Methods for sort-
ing assemblages were often restricted to counting the number 
of elements by side, articulations, sex, and age. While these 
attributes are still crucial to the process of evaluating com-
mingled remains, current forensic anthropological practice 
has expanded into new technologies and innovative software 
approaches.

The situations in which commingling can occur in mod-
ern forensic anthropology practice are varied and include 
mass or natural disasters such as aircraft crashes, earth-
quakes, and fires; humanitarian and human rights crises; 
and past military conflicts. These diverse situations, com-
bined with the goal of individual identification, have pushed 
practitioners to create new methods, use technological inno-
vations, and employ novel solutions to what is ultimately a 
very old osteological problem. And yet, while this is an old 
problem to osteologists, Ubelaker (2014) reminds us that 
commingling has only recently been tackled by forensic 
anthropologists.

The articles in this issue highlight many current advances 
in commingled assemblage examination and are expanded 
from a poster session titled “Science Matters: Challenges 

with Effecting Individual Identifications from Commingled 
Assemblages” organized for the 70th annual meeting of the 
American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Seattle, Wash-
ington, in February 2018. They present a subset of some of 
the challenges facing CHR analysis, such as poorly docu-
mented or missing historical contexts, incomplete remains, 
or poor condition of remains. While many of the articles 
included in this special issue focus on the issues surround-
ing the sorting and identification of individuals lost in past 
military conflicts, the systematic approaches, methods, and 
new technology employed are applicable to any commingled 
situation. Developing and fostering new methods is integral 
to the future development of the field.

The session was conceived by forensic anthropologists 
associated with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency 
(DPAA), which spearheads efforts to recover and identify 
missing U.S. service members. The organizers, familiar with 
several large- scale commingled human skeletal projects at 
the DPAA Laboratory, wanted to emphasize different tech-
niques devised by anthropologists both within the agency and 
at other institutions in order to tackle the myriad issues 
related to these projects.

Invited participants presented on several projects, 
reviewed existing methods of commingling, demonstrated 
new approaches, and outlined unforeseen challenges to their 
particular situations. The final session included eleven pre-
sentations representing three institutions and eight separate 
projects (Proceedings 2018). We are pleased to present eight 
papers from that session in this special issue. Topics include 
research on the accuracy of visual pair- matching; a Bayes-
ian approach to the association of skeletal remains; tests of 
the most accurate way to estimate the number of individuals 
in an assemblage; the use of biological data to inform subse-
quent DNA sequencing strategies; and four case reports from 

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Introduction
Commingled Human Remains Special Issue

Andrea Palmiottoa,b ● Carrie Brownc* ● Mary Megyesic

ABSTRACT: This paper is the introduction to the special issue on commingled human remains analysis within forensic anthropol-
ogy. It provides an overview of the articles in this special issue of Forensic Anthropology and the impetus behind the creation of the 
special issue.

KEYWORDS: forensic anthropology, commingling, postmortem identification

aIndiana University of Pennsylvania College of Humanities and Social 
Sciences— Anthropology, Indiana, PA 15705, USA

bDefense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Joint Base Pearl Harbor– 
Hickam, Hawai’i 96853, USA

cDefense POW/MIA Accounting Agency— Laboratory, Offutt AFB, 
NE 68113, USA

*Correspondence to: Carrie Brown, Defense POW/MIA Accounting 
Agency— Laboratory, 106 Peacekeeper Dr., Bldg. 301, Offutt AFB,  
NE 68113, USA



62 Introduction

large- scale commingled projects, highlighting challenges 
faced and the ways in which identification is achieved.

The case reports represent projects that were organized 
around the tenets identified in other seminal commingled 
projects, such as the Korean War Project (Jin et al. 2014) and 
those discussed in two volumes on CHR edited by Adams 
and Byrd (2008, 2014). The Korean War Project was the first 
large- scale CHR project initiated at the DPAA Laboratory. 
Based on its success, additional large- scale commingled proj-
ects have been undertaken by the agency.

In this special issue we introduce three ongoing projects 
at the DPAA associated with World War II— the Cabanatuan 
Prison Camp Cemetery Project, the Tarawa Project, and the 
USS Oklahoma Identification Project. Each of these projects 
encompasses hundreds of commingled individuals with com-
plex and unique historical contexts. These diverse projects 
present challenging situations that require creative solutions 
from the analytical teams.

The focus on World War II remains in this special issue 
(and at DPAA) is born out of the historical circumstances of 
World War II losses, their recovery, and subsequent processing 
that often resulted in commingling. All of the World War II 
projects at DPAA share a few bureaucratic root commonalities 
in how the remains were initially analyzed (Snow 1948; 
Steere & Boardman 1957; Trotter 1949). A brief outline of this 
common history offers some perspective on these projects.

After the cessation of fighting, the Department of the 
Army, American Graves Registration Services (AGRS), took 
responsibility for the recovery and identification of individ-
ual losses under the direction of the Quartermaster General 
(Steere 1951). This process included disinterring remains from 
battlefields and temporary burial sites and delivering them to 
various processing stations for analysis (Steere & Boardman 
1957). For instance, Cabanatuan remains were transported to 
mausoleums located in Manila, while remains from Tarawa 
and the Oklahoma were processed at the Schofield Barracks 
on Oahu (Harris 2010; Harris & Beckinbaugh 2017).

Dr. Mildred Trotter was the director of the Central Iden-
tification Laboratory on Oahu from 1948 through 1949. She 
oversaw identification efforts at Schofield Barracks and even 
visited Manila to offer guidance on the identifications of the 
Cabanatuan remains. Trotter lamented the difficulties in seg-
regating U.S. service members with such similar biological 
profiles. The techniques available at the time to resolve com-
mingling were somewhat limited, and Trotter and her team 
were able to identify duplicated elements and separate bones 
based on traits such as “articulation, size, color, morphology, 
and/or texture” (Trotter 1949). Trotter further notes that in 
most cases, missing skeletal elements precluded the associa-
tion of continuous skeletal elements.

For the most part, however, the enormous number of 
unidentified remains from World War II were initially pro-
cessed and recorded by AGRS personnel (Steere 1951). As a 

result, many of the World War II projects at DPAA are tasked 
with rectifying commingling caused by lack of osteological 
knowledge during these initial processing phases. During 
this post– World War II historical processing period, uniden-
tified remains were laid to rest in American military ceme-
teries located around the world (Trotter 1949). These 
individuals were buried as “unknowns” until being disin-
terred by the DPAA for reanalysis. As a result of these cir-
cumstances, the three large World War II projects highlighted 
in this issue share some historical similarities that affect the 
current analysis.

The Cabanatuan Prison Camp Cemetery Project involves 
American POWs from the Philippines, many of whom were 
part of the Bataan Death March as they were transported to 
the POW camp on Luzon Island. The camp was occupied for 
over 3 years between 1942 and 1945, with thousands of indi-
viduals transferred through the camp during that period 
(Harris & Beckinbaugh 2017). Individuals received inade-
quate food and medical care, and combined with the associ-
ated physical hardships, more than 2,700 POW deaths were 
reported during this time (Harris & Beckinbaugh 2017). Indi-
viduals were buried in mass graves at the camp cemetery by 
other POWs; however, record keeping was difficult under 
such conditions.

In this issue, the Cabanatuan Project outlines the historic 
commingling of the remains, coupled with the past errone-
ous identifications that require historical context, DNA, and 
anthropology to resolve. In her article, Megyesi promotes an 
approach that includes an in- depth examination of historical 
records and past anthropological practices, combined with 
present- day analytical techniques to resolve commingling 
and identification issues.

The Battle of Tarawa occurred in November 1943 and 
resulted in more than 1,100 American and 6,000 Japanese 
and Korean casualties on the Republic of Kiribati, a small 
island in the Pacific. Casualties from the battle were buried 
in temporary cemeteries on the island shortly after the battle 
(Steere & Boardman 1957). Later, some of these remains 
were disinterred and transported to the National Memorial 
Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP), in Hawai‘i, for reburial; 
however, less than half of the burials were located from Kiri-
bati. Recent excavations on Kiribati have focused on locat-
ing and recovering these missing burials. As outlined by 
Taylor et al., analyses in 2016 revealed that in many cases, 
the skeletal remains of a single individual can be found both 
in the NMCP remains and in the recently recovered remains 
from Kiribati.

Upon this discovery, the Tarawa team adjusted their 
methods to facilitate analyses across these varied contexts. 
Using multiple lines of evidence, including chest radiograph 
comparison, dental association, pair- matching, articulation, 
and DNA analysis, the Tarawa team associates remains and 
ensures they belong to and are reunited with the correct 



Palmiotto et al. 63

individual. The article by Taylor et al. gives an overview of 
the challenges facing the Tarawa project team and intro-
duces their multidisciplinary approach to resolving commin-
gled remains for this project, and the article by Scott et al. 
shows how this approach is used with two specific project 
cases.

The goal of the USS Oklahoma Identification Project is 
to segregate and identify the nearly four hundred individu-
als missing from the battleship after the 7 December 1941 
bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the 1940s the AGRS attempted 
to treat the associated skeletal remains as a massive group 
burial, with individuals desegregated and “like” elements 
bundled together (Harris 2010). After the mass burial was 
denied, the commingling was further exacerbated as ana-
lysts attempted to reassociate elements back into discrete 
individuals (Harris 2010). This approach proved impossi-
ble based on available technologies, and these patchwork 
“individuals” were buried as “unknowns” until DPAA re- 
initiated large- scale identification efforts in 2015. The extent 
of commingling was revealed when 177 elements from the 
first casket were sampled for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) 
analyses and 95 distinct mtDNA sequences were obtained. 
In this issue, Brown provides an overview of the Oklahoma 
project and the steps the project team takes to individually 
identify remains.

Since the inception of the project in 2015, the Oklahoma 
team has endeavored to develop new strategies and test exist-
ing methods to effectively inventory, segregate, and identify 
the associated elements. Three of the articles in this special 
issue use the Oklahoma assemblage as the basis for research 
to refine commingled remains analyses. Brown and Lynch 
discuss ways in which biological profile data is used to pri-
oritize DNA sequencing, LeGarde tests the accuracy of 
visual pair- matching, and Palmiotto et al. describe the ways 
in which the project team codifies the approach to invento-
rying elements and present various methods used to estimate 
the number of individuals in the assemblage.

Finally, McCormick considers the implications of tradi-
tional osteometric associations, including pair- matching and 
articulation, when using frequentist and Bayesian statistical 
frameworks for commingled assemblages. In frequentist 
approaches, an analyst tests the null hypothesis to determine 
whether two elements are similar enough that they could 
belong to the same individual. In other words, the null 
hypothesis works around the concept of exclusion. In Bayes-
ian approaches, on the other hand, an analyst attempts to 
determine whether two elements belong to the same individ-
ual, and thus focuses on the concept of association. McCor-
mick tests the feasibility of Bayesian associations using 
measurements from 800 elements. He subsamples this data 
set to create commingled simulations with a Bayesian regres-
sion model. Correct matches were identified in roughly half 
of the 7,500 simulations.

The eight articles in this issue highlight new approaches, 
perspectives, and theoretical concerns when attempting to 
resolve large commingled assemblages. They demonstrate 
that complex commingling problems can be resolved with a 
combination of new technology and old evaluation techniques 
(e.g., Snow 1948; Stewart 1979; Trotter 1949). Through this 
issue, we introduce ways forensic anthropology has built on 
our foundational anthropological methods and present new 
technological solutions. Each commingled assemblage is 
unique in its history, challenges, and context. While no single 
approach is universally applicable, we hope the cases and sit-
uations we present here offer strategies for resolution for all 
the varied casework forensic anthropologists encounter.

Regardless of the historical context— battlefields, human 
rights investigations, mass disasters, cremation, and so 
forth— identification and resolution for the families and their 
communities are the driving force behind these scientific 
endeavors and are, at heart, the meaning and importance 
behind this work. Wagner concludes this special issue by 
summarizing these case studies and research papers with a 
reminder of the human element and personal perspectives that 
accompany these projects. As scientists, we must focus on 
objective methods and standardization for accurate individu-
ation and segregation; however, we must also recognize and 
acknowledge the significance of this work to those still living.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of the symposium participants and authors 
of the enclosed articles. Thanks also to Dr. Aelwen Wetherby, 
who provided helpful feedback on historical citations, and to 
the anonymous peer reviewer, who provided comments on 
this introduction. The views expressed herein are those of the 
authors and do not represent those of the Defense POW/MIA 
Accounting Agency, Department of Defense, or the United 
States government.

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