In the late 1980s, partly in response to demands from American
forensic anthropology organizations to scrutinize methods of racial identification in order to ensure accuracy in legal cases, Gill tested, supported, and developed
craniofacial anthropometric and other means of estimating the racial origins of skeletal remains. He found that the employment of multiple criteria can yield very high rates of accuracy, and even that individual methods can be accurate more than 80 percent of the time. Gill cites these findings in arguing against the
scientific consensus to treat human
races as
social constructs. Gill suggests that "race denial" can stem from overstatements of the importance of
clinal variation among human
phenotypes, and from "politically motivated censorship" in the mistaken but
"politically correct" belief that "race promotes racism". Gill argues that "we can often
function within systems that we do not believe in": Categories can have practical utility, even if they also seem conceptually problematic.
Easter Island Gill has researched human
osteology on the
Polynesian island and
Chilean territory of
Easter Island, Materials that he has gathered form part of the osteological collection of Chile's national museum. ==References==