The face of prehistoric Britain: Forensic scientist uses Neolithic man’s 5,500-year-old skull to create lifelike image
- most advanced reconstruction of an early Neolithic man’s face
- Work to ‘restore the dignity’
Article 2: Popular Archeology
- He creates, quite literally, faces of our collective past.
- In fact, most of Nilsson’s hyper-realistic reconstructions end up in museums such as the Moesgård, where he hopes the public will, through his reconstructions, gain a more personal connection to history.
“History is made of actual people,” he says. “Making a facial reconstruction is like opening a window to the past, an opportunity to see what the people from history really looked like. So the face tells a direct story to the beholder, establishing an emotional and personal connection that text or written records can never accomplish.”
Method:
- Nilsson creates his pieces using 3-D models of the original skulls of his subjects, developing models by applying non-drying plasticine clay to recreate the muscles and tissues using traditional sculpting tools and then applying the finishing work on Acrystal molds of his resulting models. To do this accurately, Nilsson obtains information about the times and places in which the persons lived, the contexts and circumstances of the original skeletal finds, and detailed findings from the examining osteologists and forensic experts about the skulls of the individuals excavated or exhumed. The results, in addition to being astonishingly realistic, provide three dimensional likenesses of the individuals, something that cannot be realized even by typical artist depictions through two dimensional paintings
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/fall-2015/article/faces-from-the-past
http://www.odnilsson.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=60
Oscar Nilsson
- He is a sculptor, though not of the usual variety.
- One can see a vacuum machine for castings, a lightboard, airbrush tools, brushes, and other tools of his trade, including a smaller room for castings and mold-making.
- Oscar Nilsson has a passion for reconstructing the past, or, more specifically, human faces of the past.
- He can do this because he is not only an artist, but also an archaeologist by education, armed with a knowledge of human anatomy, a familiarity with osteology (the scientific study of bones], and a finely honed set of skills for handling specialized materials to create lifelike, hyper-realistic facial reconstructions of individuals who came and went long before us, before the advent of photography.
- They illuminate our understanding of our collective past.
“Making a facial reconstruction is like opening a window to the past, an opportunity to see what the people from history really looked like,” he told Popular Archaeology. “So the face tells a direct story to the beholder, establishing an emotional and personal connection that text or written records can never accomplish.”
…says “give me pause to think.” So life-like are the reconstructions, one could almost ask of these long-dead people: “Have we met before?”
- archaeology, history, osteological analysis, state-of-the-art technology, and the skill of a seasoned artist and other artisans—all have combined to inform the creation.
Birger Jarl
Estrid as an old woman.
