Osteological data, such as biological sex, constitute a base for research in paleodemography and palaeopathology, as well as for understanding past socio-cultural practices. Despite extensive research efforts concerning cremated human remains over the past decades, an internationally acknowledged, standardized osteological protocol is not fully agreed upon. Furthermore, assessing cremation research practices from the literature is challenging because analysis reports are often written in the national languages of practitioners, which makes them difficult to access by an international audience. This study addresses this gap by directly reaching out to experts working with cremated human remains through an online questionnaire in Lime Survey. The aim is to identify and characterize patterns in cremation analysis practices. A particular emphasis was put on the methods of biological sex estimation. While the significance of these data is widely acknowledged, the ways in which they are obtained in practice are seldom examined. The results of this survey reveal an absence of standardization in protocols of analysis, and data collection, as well as in reporting on the cremated remains in publications and reports. Notably, the findings reveal regional preferences in methodological choices and inconsistent institutional training. A majority of respondents expressed a preference for traditional morphological methods over recently published metric and alternative methods for sex estimation. These variations underscore the complexity of establishing standardized cremation analysis protocols and highlight the importance of considering regional contexts and training in shaping future research practices.
Copyright: © 2024 Hlad et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.