Richard Jantz

Richard L. Jantz served as the director of the Forensic Anthropology Center from 1998–2011 and is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses on forensic anthropology, skeletal biology, dermatoglyphics, anthropometry, anthropological genetics, and human variation, as well as developing computerized databases in these areas which aid in anthropological research. The author of over a hundred journal articles and other publications, his research has helped lead and shape the field of physical and forensic anthropology for many years.

Among his students was Douglas W. Owsley.

Jantz spent his childhood and received his early education in a small town in central Kansas. He attended a community college before attending Kansas University, where he took a class from noted anthropologist Dr. William M. Bass. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology in 1962, a Master of Arts in Anthropology in 1964, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1970, all from the University of Kansas. He realized early on that his strengths lay in statistical analysis of measurements.

Some of Jantz’s more current research involves quantitative osteometric and anthropometric variation among Native American populations, including an analysis of the work of Franz Boas.

In the early 1900s, Boas conducted an anthropometric study showing the plasticity of the human body in response to environmental changes. Testing the skeletal measurements of children of immigrants to the US, he found that their measurements were closer to the American mean than to the mean of their home countries. Boas saw this as an argument that nutrition and environment was more important in determining body measurements than racial background, and his study was widely seen as discrediting racial anthropometry.

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