Victim remains at fatal fire scenes are typically difficult to detect, recover and handle. All of the burned material at the scene, including biological tissue, is often modified to a similar appearance, and bones, in particular, become discolored, brittle, and highly fragmented. As a consequence, these remains are often missed, disturbed, altered, or even destroyed during scene processing with the existing protocols. The added postmortem fracturing, fragmentation and bone loss resulting from these recovery techniques hinder the already difficult task of autopsy and laboratory analysis of burned human remains. This is especially problematic for bone trauma analysis, as its most immediate goal is distinguishing perimortem (forensically significant) trauma, from postmortem (not forensically significant) alteration. The substantial addition of trauma features created by fire and then recovery can result in a daunting analytical task. Lack of on-scene recordation of relevant information related to body positioning and contextual relationships of remains as well as other physical evidence at the scene, further complicate trauma analysis, biological profile estimation, and event reconstruction. For the trauma analyst, it is arguably difficult to detect and characterize atypical, potentially forensically significant trauma, if the extent of exposure of individual portions of the body to fire is unknown. In addition, very little and often contradictory information regarding what is considered "normal" fire alterations of the human body had been presented. The information lacuna notably included specific burn sequences of soft tissue and patterns of hard tissue modification. The same problem affected estimates as simple and relevant as whether a missing element was ever present at the scene, missed during recovery, or totally consumed by fire. The present study addressed these problems by linking rigorous scene recovery and documentation methodologies with subsequent laboratory analyses (in particular, bone trauma analysis) of heat altered human remains from fatal fire scenes. This was accomplished by: 1) developing and testing effective fatal fire scene recovery protocols and guidelines, which have proved to maximize the location, documentation and recovery of biological tissues (including bone), while minimizing postmortem bone alteration and damage due to collection and transport methods, 2) precisely documenting and presenting "normal" soft tissue burn sequence and resulting bone modification in fully fleshed human bodies, burned under controlled (crematorium) conditions and from actual forensic cases and 3) analyzing the macro- and microscopic effects of fire and heat on previously well-described diagnostic characteristics of tool marks in bone, which served to demonstrate that most of these diagnostic traits can be usually preserved, with their full evidentiary value, even after calcination.