Despite the fact that rear impact events have been studied extensively, there is no consensus as to the exact mechanism of injury or most relevant injury criterion. However, there is reasonably good agreement that the injuries occur due to relative rotation and displacement between adjacent vertebrae which exceeds the physiological range of motion (ROM), thus illustrating the importance of being able to measure the detailed intervertebral kinematics of the cervical spine during a rear impact event. In this study a new instrumentation and dissection technique was proposed and validated in which instrumentation (three accelerometers, three angular rate sensors) capable of measuring the detailed intervertebral kinematics are installed on the anterior aspects of each vertebral body with no muscular damage. This is accomplished by dissecting the lateral aspect of the neck to access the anterior vertebral bodies through the retropharyngeal space. The instrumentation was validated by conducting 10 km/h rear impact tests with post mortem human subjects (PMHS) in a rigid rolling chair. The instrumentation was installed on five of the cervical vertebrae (C3 – C7) to measure the translational (x- & z- direction) and angular (y- direction) displacements during the event. Initial 3D orientation of the instrumentation was defined by digitizing points on each instrumentation block. Steinman pins were drilled into the anterior portion of the cervical vertebral body, and fiducials were attached to the end of the pins to record the motion of the cervical vertebrae using high speed cameras. Data from the instrumentation was transformed to the fiducials and compared with results from video analysis, and the ability of the proposed instrumentation to successfully capture the detailed cervical kinematics was quantified by calculating the normalized root mean squared deviation (NRMSD), which provides an average percent error over time. Results indicate that the proposed instrumentation is capable of accurately measuring the detailed cervical kinematics, and this instrumentation methodology will allow for full-body PMHS to be tested in realistic seating environments (i.e., modern yielding seat backs) at any impact severity. The data obtained from this instrumentation in future testing should prove useful in the investigation of rear impact injury mechanisms and aid in the development and evaluation of injury criteria.