Using data from the US Korean War Dead and the Terry Collection to demonstrate problems of the common “overlap methods”

The “overlap method” is commonly used to produce age-at-death intervals from bones and/or teeth in forensic cases. This method combines age intervals from reference sample summary statistics of ages within stages or composite scores. The combination is achieved by taking the maximum of the lower boundaries for age intervals and the minimum for the upper boundaries for age intervals. These age intervals may be age ranges (minima and maxima) or plus and minus some multiplier of the standard deviation of age around the mean age. This chapter uses the Terry Anatomical Collection as the reference sample and applies variants of the “overlap method” to a sample of US Korean War Dead. The results are compared to a transition analysis with an informative prior age distribution and with a uniform prior. The “overlap method” is found to perform very poorly relative to transition analysis.