MISSING & MURDERED: A PERSONAL ADVENTURE IN FORENSIC IN SOUTH AFRICA

What can human bones tell us of a persons life, or even death? How can information from bones solve mysteries both modern and ancient? And what makes the study of skeletonised human remains so imperative in southern Africa? The answers to these and other questions are contained in Missing & Murdered, which lays bare the fascinating world of forensic anthropology. As the popularity of TV programmes such as the CSI trilogy and Silent Witness attests, people are fascinated by forensic science as a means of solving crimes, and in this book Alan G. Morris follows the pathway into forensics via the fields of anthropology and anatomy. He makes the practice of forensic anthropology, the skills base of skeletal biology and the study of archaeological skeletons hugely accessible to the layperson in a series of fascinating cases, from muti murders and political killings to the work of the Missing Persons Task Team. An informative, original and engrossing read from one intriguing chapter to the next.  Softcover, 280 pages. Published 2011 About the Author: Alan G. Morris is currently Professor in the Department of Human Biology at the University of Cape Town. A Canadian by birth and upbringing, he is also a naturalised South African. Prof. Morris has an undergraduate degree in Biology from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, and a PhD in anatomy from the University of the Witwatersrand. He has published extensively on the origin of anatomically modern humans, and the Later Stone Age, Iron Age and Historic populations of Malawi, Namibia and South Africa.  In more recent years he has extended his skeletal biology knowledge to the field of forensic anthropology. He has published on the history of race classification, the history of physical anthropology in South Africa and the Canadian involvement in the Anglo-Boer War. He is a council member of the Van Riebeeck Society for the Publication of Southern African Historical Documents, an associate editor of the South African Journal of Science and an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.