Centuries-old mummies from the Andes in Colombia are digitally unmasked and virtually reconstructed, revealing what they look like during their lifetimes.
These individuals, who lived between the 13th and 18th centuries, were buried in death masks covering their faces and jaws. They are the only Colombian examples of cultural practices common to other communities in pre-Columbian South America. However, little was known about these four individuals and the archaeological context, as their graves were plundered.
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These reconstructions highlight the “attractive cultural practices” of indigenous peoples who lived in South America, Jessicalieu, project manager at the Faith Lab at John Moore University in the UK.
The mummies are children aged 6-7, women in their 60s and two young adult men, all with stylized masks made from resin, clay, wax and corn. All masks are damaged and lack a nose and mass along the base, but some ornamental beads that outline the eyes remain. The individual was a pre-Hispanic population in East Cordillera, a region of the Colombian Andes, and radiocarbon dating indicates that they lived between 1216 and 1797.
CT scans were performed on masked skulls. CT scans generate virtual 3D images by using x-rays to take lots of images of 2D slices of samples and bring them together. So, teams can “effably mask the skull digitally” by removing layers that contain masks, Liu told Live Science.
The researchers then used specialized software and a tactile touch stylus to overlay muscles, soft tissues and fat digitally on unmasked skulls. Liu said this is something like a virtual sculpture, using skull scaffolding to ensure that tissue is perfectly tailored to the individual.
The team added soft tissue to the skulls of two young adult men using mean facial tissue depth data for modern adult male Colombians. The team did not use such data to add such data to the other two skulls, as there are no modern tissue data currently available for Colombian children and women. But they still rebuild these faces, add muscles, fine-tune them to a specific skull, and swell the child’s face with fat. The size and shape of the nose were determined by measuring the bone tissue of the skull and selecting the optimal nose from the optional array.
The team gave individuals the typical skin, eyes and hair colours of individuals in the area, giving them a neutral look. Next came the difficult part, Liu said, because they had to add “textures” of their faces: wrinkles, eyelashes, freckles, pores. This is a long process of making constant changes until they find the perfect fit.
“Textures are always the biggest challenge, because whether they present themselves, whether they have facial scars or tattoos, or whether it is actually a skin tone.” “What we present from a texture perspective is an average expression based on what we know about these individuals.”
This is an important point, as Liu creates faces based on group averages. This means that these new, unmasked faces are not accurate portraits of these individuals. They “indicated what they looked like, not ‘This is what they looked like,'” she said.
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