The centuries -old mummies from the And of Columbia were digital exposure and are practically reconstructed, revealing how they could look throughout their lives.
These people, who lived somewhere between the 13th and 18th centuries, were buried with death masks covering their faces and jaws. They are the only Colombian examples of cultural practice, otherwise, common to communities in other parts of the pre -Columbian South America. However, since their graves were plundered, little was known about these four individuals and their archaeological context.
These reconstruction emphasize the “exciting cultural practices” of the indigenous peoples who lived in South America, Jessica LiuFace Lab project manager at Liverpool University John Murs in the UK, said in statement About the project.
Mummies belong to a child aged 6 to 7 years, a woman aged 60 years and two young adult men, all with stylized masks of resin, clay, wax and corn attached to their faces. All masks are damaged, with missing noses and pieces along the base, but some decorative beads that describe the eyes. People were from the pre -analysis populations in the eastern cordils, the region in the Colombian Andes, with Radiocarbon acquaintance Indicating that they lived between 1216 and 1797.
Ct were made on turtles in a mask. CT use x-rays to generate virtual three-dimensional images, shooting many images of 2D sample cuts and collecting them together. From this, the team could “effectively expose the skull in digital form”, removing the layers containing the mask, said Liuhi science.
Then the researchers used specialized software and Haptic Touch Stylus Pen To apply muscles, soft tissues and fat on digital without a mask -a cap. Liu said that it looks like a virtual sculpture where you use the forests of the skull to give fabric perfectly to a person.
The team used data on the depths of the middle fabric of the face from modern Colombians of adults to add soft tissues to two young adult male skulls. The team did not use such data to add soft tissues to two other skulls, since modern these fabrics currently do not exist for Colombian children and women. Nevertheless, they still reconstructed these faces, adding muscles and setting them up to correspond to each specific skull, and knocking the child’s face with some fat. The size and shape of the nose was determined by measuring the bone tissues of the skull, and then choosing the most suitable nose from many options.
The team gave people skin, eyes and hair color, typical of people from the region, and gave them a neutral expression on the face. Then, according to Liu, she began to come to the fact that they came because they had to add the “texture of the face”: wrinkles, eyelashes, freckles and pores. This is a long process of making constant changes until they find the best.
“The texture is always the biggest problem, simply because we simply do not know how they are presented, regardless of whether they have any scars on the face or tattoos, or if it is actually a skin tone,” Liu said. “What we represent from the point of view of the texture is the average representation based on what we know about these people.”
This is an important point, Liu said, because they create faces based on the average values of groups, “but no one is ever average.” This means that these freshly possible faces are not accurate portraits of these people; They show “how they could look, and not“ this is what they looked like, ”she said.
