Richard Jantz

Richard Jantz is an American Anthropologist. He focused on fields such as forensic anthropology, genetics, and also organized existing information in databases. He has written over 100 published articles, and his research has led the fields of physical and forensic anthropology. Jantz is currently a professor for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. 

 Background 
Richard Jantz grew up in central Kansas, and went to Kansas University. At school, he found that his strengths lay in statistical analysis. 

 Research 
Jantz's recent research involves measuring the differences in bone size and shape between different Native American tribes. In this research, he challenged work done by Franz Boas, a founder of modern anthropology. The original study, done by Boas in the early 1900s, showed that children born in America had bones closer to other American adults, and children born in Europe had bones closer to those of other Europeans. In 2002, Jantz did his own study to test Boas' findings. He writes that he found no significant difference between the bones of American and European children, but his study receives criticism from many other anthropologists. 

A well-respected anthropologist, Jonathan Marks, said that Jantz's new research "has the ring of desperation to it (if not obfuscation), and has been quickly rebutted by more mainstream biological anthropology." Later, other anthropologists also looked back over Boas' study and found that he was actually correct.  

Richard Jantz has also worked to advance scientific methods of determining sex based on bone shape. He has worked with many Native American remains to organize data in large computer databases. 

Jantz played a large role in the discovery and legal battle over a prehistoric skeleton called the Kennewick Man, suing the government to get more access to it for research. He argued that since the skeleton was radiocarbon dated to about 9,000 years old, no modern-day Native American tribes could really claim the skeletons as their own under the NAGPRA law. 

He worked to identify the crew of a confederate shipwreck found near South Carolina, and was part of a reexamination of the Nikumaroro bones to determine if they could have belonged to Amelia Earhart.

 References 

Category:American anthropologists
Category:Living people