Two workshops were held at the University of Coimbra’s Department of Life Sciences, organized by the Forensic Anthropology and Paleobiology research group of the Centre for Functional Ecology (CEF). The University of Coimbra is one of the three European partners of the Bakeng se Afrika Project, funded by the Erasmus + program of the European Union. This project aims to create a digital database of South African osteological collections, build standard operating procedures for bone digitization, store and analyse digital data, and create ethical standards in the use and in the digitization of human remains.
These workshops took place from the 26th to the 30th of August, on statistics, and from the 2nd to the 6th of September, dealing with the analysis of bone trauma.
The purpose of the statistics workshop was to provide participants with essential tools to data science in anthropology. The course provided an introduction to the R language as well as statistical analysis. It was intended to provide the basic knowledge necessary for the independent use of the R programming language, thus helping participants to start their own research projects and produce publications.
The focus of the second workshop was to provide participants with broad practical training and discussions on the application of the current biomechanical methodology in interpreting bone traumatic injuries. The national and international institutional collaboration of this workshop was a unique opportunity to address the problems encountered by practitioners in a forensic environment when analysing and interpreting traumatic injuries.
These workshops brought professionals from various regions of the world (South Africa, Germany, Brazil, Croatia, USA, France, England, Italy, Sweden) to the University of Coimbra.