Facial Reconstruction Of An Ancient Mycenaean Skull

I performed a facial reconstruction on an ancient Mycenaean person to create a visual connection to these people and their experiences in the past. While facial reconstruction is most often used in forensic science to identify a recently deceased person, it can also be a useful tool for anthropologists and historians (Snow et al. 1970). Giving the people of the past a face allows the general public to empathize with the forgotten and can lead to more support for the work of anthropologists (Klimecki et al. 2016). I worked at a field school in Aidonia, Greece excavating a chamber tomb in a Bronze Age cemetery. The well preserved skull of a man, dubbed “Burial 4,” was found in the tomb. I took photos of the skull, used photogrammetry, the process which pieces 2D photos together to create a 3D image, and printed the skull out to scale. Onto the skull, I applied flesh depth markers and laid clay over it to recreate muscles and the full anatomy of the face. The finished product of this process is a complete bust of Burial 4. I used the specific features of the skull to determine how the completed face might have looked when Burial 4 was alive, using only a minimal amount of artistic interpretation. In this thesis I explore the entire process of the reconstruction from the discovery of the skull to the completion of the bust.