Their faces have been lost to the world, but now it is possible to see the real appearance of three people who died in medieval Scotland.
The facial reconstruction of three people who died during the Middle Ages in Scotland has surprised the world of science and technology.
In 1957, workmen working on the vault of an abandoned medieval crypt in Whithorn, Scotland, made an unusual discovery that led to the unearthing of dozens of graves of members of the clergy and wealthy donors to the medieval priory.
Now, more than 60 years later, archaeologists from the University of Bradford and other specialists, using state-of-the-art forensic science and 3D facial reconstruction technology, have digitally recreated the faces of three of these skeletons found, “bringing them back” to life after 700 years.
Cold Case Project
Specifically, within the framework of the Cold Case Whithorn project, the experts reconstructed three inhabitants of Wigtownshire 12th to 14th centuries.
They are a woman, a clergyman with cleft lip and palate and a bishop, who were buried at Whithorn Priory, in the Scottish region of Dumfries and Galloway.
The Whithorn burials are of enormous archaeological importance, as it is considered to be the “cradle of Scottish Christianity”home to the oldest known Christian community in Scotland, having been continuously occupied for some 1,600 years.
How was the facial reconstruction of these people done?
Christopher Rynn, a craniofacial anthropologist and forensic artist, applied the forensic method of approximation, reconstruction and facial representation to 3D scans of each skull, according to the University of Bradford press release.
“This involves the use of facial soft tissue depths, individually sculpted musculature to fit each skull, and scientific methods of estimating each facial feature, such as eyes, nose, mouth and ears, from skull morphology,” he said. Rynn.
To achieve this extraordinary realism, Rynn also used artificial intelligence to revive them, causing them to move, blink and even smile as if they were alive.
“I didn’t want these faces to look like digital sculpture, so when it came to the muscles, I sculpted them in wax and then 3D-scanned them in the same way as the skull,” Rynn said in a video introducing the project.
“I made it look like a person by adding photo textures, which is a process of selecting photos of several different people that look like the 3D model and then projecting them onto the skull,” he added.
“It is a challenge to imagine what life was like in medieval times”
The Whithorn Trust presented the animations during the Wigtown Book Festival on September 30 as a way of reviewing “the archaeological archive of the area”, according to BBC News.
“It’s always a challenge to imagine what life was really like in medieval times,” explains to BBC News Julia Muir Watt, director of development of the foundation.
“These reconstructions are a brilliant way to engage with who these people from our past really were, their daily lives, their hopes and their beliefs.”
“It was very interesting to work with the skulls side by side because one of them, the priest with the cleft lip and palate, is the most asymmetrical skull I’ve ever worked on,” Rynn said in the video. .
“The other, the young woman’s, is the most symmetrical skull I’ve ever worked on.”