Elsevier, Spectrochimica Acta Part B: Atomic Spectroscopy, (99), p. 70-75, 2014
DOI: 10.1016/j.sab.2014.06.006
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The elemental analysis of human bones can give information about the dietary habits of the deceased, especially in the last years of their lives, which can be useful for forensic studies. The most important requirement that must be satisfied for this kind of analysis is that the concentrations of analysed elements is the same as ante mortem. In this work, a set of bones was analysed using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) and validated using Inductively Coupled Plasma – Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES), in order to compare those two techniques and to investigate the effect of possible alterations in the elemental concentrations' proportion resulting from the treatment usually applied for preparing the bones for traditional forensic analysis. The possibility that elemental concentrations’ changes would occur after accidental or intentional burning of the bones was also studied.