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As visitors explore the recently opened Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland, they come face to face with the past.
Real-life digital face reconstructions of people who lived across the Perth and Kinross region of Scotland centuries ago blink and change their expressions as museumgoers pass by.
The reconstructions, which combine art, anthropology, technology and archaeology, are on permanent display at the museum, which opened on 30 March.
The reconstructions are based on skulls found across Scotland, including a Bronze Age woman who lived around 4,000 years ago, an Iron Age man from AD 500 and men and women who lived during Scotland’s medieval period in the 14th and 15th century, for example a young man victim of murder.
The museum collaborated with Dr. Chris Rynn, a craniofacial anthropologist and forensic artist, along with researchers from the University of Aberdeen to study the ancient remains and bring them back to life in a unique way that can connect local visitors more deeply with their heritage, said Mark Hall, collections officer at Perth Museum and Art Gallery.
Visitors can see every step of the process of facial reconstruction, from looking at the skulls on display to using accessible screens that show how anthropologists reassemble a skull, create digital models and find the final product.
Museum-goers will be able to digitally build the face models themselves and see the results, even having the ability to tweak hair and eye color for some recreation.
“I’m working with the Perth Museum on seven skulls,” said Rynn, “doing a forensic facial reconstruction of each one to turn into these interactive touch screen displays so visitors to the museum can go through the whole estimation process and sculpture. face.”
The museum’s collections aim to tell the story of the people who have lived in Perth for the past 10,000 years, Hall said.
“As part of our approach to try to humanize that story, we reconstructed faces from the past using human skull evidence and applying forensic anthropological techniques,” Hall said. “We can learn about a particular place by studying the people and how they related to each other, what kind of relationships they had, what kind of life they lived, how well they got on with it the rest of the world. And archeology and anthropology find a lot of evidence that tells us about those things.”
Uncovering Scotland’s history
She lived somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, but a Bronze Age woman whose face is being recreated looks like someone who wouldn’t look out of place in modern society.
“I think seeing faces from hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago can teach us how little people have changed during that time,” Rynn said.
Her remains were first found after a tractor broke through a burial chamber under Lochlands Farm in Perthshire in 1962. Her body was found in a crouched position, with the lower left side of the facial bones cut cleanly.
“It is the opinion of the excavator that a fatal injury occurred,” according to information shared by the museum.
Recent research on the remains, including DNA and dental analysis, has shown that the woman was in her 30s when she died. Her bones showed degeneration of the joints in her lower back, suggesting she had back pain.
A depression was also found on the right frontal bone of her skull which was probably caused by blunt force. Since the injury did not penetrate the internal cranium, the researchers believe that the injury occurred just before her death, and she may have hit her head on something hard.
Another skull of an Iron Age male, probably in his 40s when he died, was discovered during building work in the early 1980s in Perthshire. His remains date back to the sixth century, and scientists think he was a Pict, an ancient group originally from Scotland. Analysis of his bones revealed that he spent his youth on the west coast of Scotland and then did rough agricultural work, eating pork, wild fowl and freshwater fish.
He moved to Perthshire late in life, and his grave was sealed with a whetstone used to grind grain by hand.
During the construction of a concert hall in the early 2000s, near the Perth Museum and Art Gallery, archaeologists discovered the complete skeleton of a young man who died between the ages of 18 and 25 in the late 14th century.
The skeleton was found stuffed into a shallow pit under the foundations of an old tenement building. Although hollows in his skull were likely the result of a hasty burial, new research suggests he died a violent death and was likely the victim of murder.
He suffered two blunt force injuries to two ribs as well as multiple rib fractures, likely due to significant forces applied to his chest during the confrontation. Analysis of his bones did not reveal any chronic illnesses, but the researchers noted that his growth had been severely stunted during his childhood, which could have been caused by illness or malnutrition.
Two silver coins were found with the skeleton, from 1279 to 1322 and 1367 to 1371.
Resurrecting ancient faces
Rynn made physical and digital models during his reconstruction work after studying the shape of each skull, which helped him determine and estimate the shape of each face.
It took about 50 hours to recreate each skull. All skulls were 3D scanned.
Digital scans allowed Rynn to fill in gaps or missing pieces from the skulls by illustrating what was on the other side. Dental patterns also allowed him to reconstruct part of the Bronze Age woman’s missing jaw. After digitally recreating each skull, Rynn added layers of tissue, estimating tissue depth by studying the shape of each skull.
“For me personally, when I’m sculpting them and working on the faces, it feels like I’m meeting someone as well as they’re coming to the end of the sculpt,” Rynn said.
Next, he sculpted the facial muscles in white wax, scanned them in 3D and digitized them to reassemble the faces. At the end of his reconstructions, Rynn used an algorithm to animate the faces, allowing them to blink or change expressions.
“Finally, you have to bring them to life,” Rynn said. “So what I do is turn that 3D model into a photorealistic portrait and then use an algorithm to make the portrait I made blink and look around a little bit.”
Although the process is methodical, it results in something similar to what Rynn saw around him in real life.
“When you’re in Scotland, if you have Scottish ancestry, people can often tell and guess which clan the ancestry comes from just by looking at your face,” Rynn said. “I was walking around Perth, and I would see people who looked like one of the reconstructions I was working on, and I felt like I was meeting people I was sculpting.”
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