Medicolegal investigation of an eighteenth century homicide

The skeleton of an adult man, recovered from an eighteenth century French fort site in Indiana, exhibited a series of sharp force wounds. The lesions, three cranial and one postcranial, had apparently been made by a heavy metal instrument similar to one of the European ax heads discovered elsewhere at the site. In this paper we describe the wounds, argue that the instrument used to create them was a European ax, and offer the opinion that the manner of death in this case was homicide.