New siding techniques for the manual phalanges: A blind test

The purpose of this study was to conduct a blind test of siding techniques for the 14 phalanges of the human hand. A list of possible siding techniques was initially developed using four loosely articulated hand skeletons from an anatomical supply company, was later refined using ten skeletons with individually labelled hand bones from the Terry Anatomical Collection, and then was 'field tested' on protohistoric Arikara skeletons from South Dakota. The most promising of these techniques were blind tested by the authors on a sample of 50 Terry collection individuals. For each bone, the first author selected a specimen from either the right or left side, and the second author determined the side to which it most likely belonged, based on a written description of each technique and a rough sketch. Accuracies for the proximal phalanges (PP) were generally good, ranging from 100% for PP1 to 88% for PP5. Among the intermediate phalanges (IP), accuracies clustered between 96% and 98% except for IP4, which could only be correctly sided 78% of the time. Results for the distal phalanges (DP) were generally poor. Although DP1 was correctly sided 94% of the time, accuracies for the other distal phalanges ranged from a low of 52% to a high of 78%. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.