Oschinsky-McKern Award (By A. J. Rand, September 2015)

This award was originally instituted in 1975 to honour the memory of Dr. Lawrence Oschinsky, and Dr. Thomas McKern was added the following year. It honours Drs. Lawrence Oschinsky and Thomas McKern, two researchers who were seminal to the study of physical anthropology in Canada and beyond. A brief biography outlining the lives and accomplishments of Drs. Oschinsky and McKern are presented below. Dr. Charles Ernest Eyman (1933-1990) instituted and funded the Oschinsky-McKern Award for the best student paper at the annual conference from his own pocket for over a decade.

Dr. Lawrence Oschinsky (1921-1965) completed his B.A. at Brooklyn College and an M.A. at the University of Chicago studying sociology and general anthropology from 1939 to 1947. From 1947 to 1953 he completed a doctorate in Anatomy, Zoology and Physical Anthropology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, taking a short hiatus from 1951-1952 where he taught and collected and analyzed data for his dissertation research. From 1953 to 1958, he took up several short-term positions that broadened his teaching and research experience (see Ossenberg 2001). In 1958, he moved to Canada when he was appointed Curator of Physical Anthropology at the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization) in the late 1950s and in 1963 he took up an appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Oschinsky was passionate about the variation present in human populations, and was inspired by debate with various colleagues and the morphological diversity of Canadian skeletal collections and living Inuit populations. Dr. Oschinsky placed a strong emphasis on understand evolutionary theory and taxonomy (Gaherty et al. 1969), and went on to develop the total morphological pattern, or “the constellation of traits of the nasal bones, cheek bones and mandible that in sum distinguish one group of people from another” (Ossenberg 2001; see also Gaherty et al. 1969) that characterized the “Arctic Mongoloid” facial skeleton and to question the origins and affinities of Inuit peoples. Ossenberg (2001) illustrates that Dr. Oschinsky’s most influential contribution to Canadian osteology was The Most Ancient Eskimo (Oschinksy 1964), in which he used measurements and morphological observations of the cranium of First Nations and Siberian people to illustrate the Dorset crania are clearly affiliate with Inuit rather than other First Nations groups such as the Beothuk of Cree. For more information regarding the contributions of Dr. Oschinsky to osteology in Canada and elsewhere, please see Gaherty et al. (1969), Ossenberg (2001), and Spencer (1997:247).

Dr. Thomas W. McKern (1920-1974) earned his Ph.B. from the University of Wisconsin with a major in anthropology and honors in sociology, zoology and geology in 1943, and received his M.S. in anthropology under the guidance of W. W. Howells in 1948, also from Wisconsin. From 1948 to 1949, Dr. McKern worked with the American Graves Registration service where he developed techniques for post-mortem identification of remains and helped establish identification centres in the Pacific for the identification of American war dead. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1954 from the Univeristy of California, Berkley, and from 1955 to 1958 he held a variety of positions (see Steele 1975:161). He began his career as a professor at the University of Texas in 1958, and at the University of Kansas from 1967 to 1971, and Simon Fraser University from 1971 until his death in 1974.

Dr. McKern played a key role in the development of skeletal biology and forensic anthropology in North America. He was also a passionate teacher, interested in skeletal morphology of prehistoric populations as well as the history of physical anthropology and the natural history of humanity. He is perhaps best known for his research in the field of forensic medicine, specifically the techniques he developed for distinguishing commingled remains and analyzing skeletal age changes in young American males (McKern and Stewart 1957). Furthermore, Dr. McKern was instrumental in formulating the correlation between bone robusticity with the perforation of the coronoid-olecranon septum in the human humerus and the assessment of maximum long bone length from fragmentary elements (Steele 1975:161). He was also an active consultant in identifying unknown human skeletons for several law enforcement agencies in both Canada and the United States and served as associate editor of the Kansas Academy of Sciences (1969-1971) and editorial advisor to Syesis and Science Digest. For more information on the life and accomplishments of Dr. McKern, please see Steele (1975).