Making faces

Description

This is the compelling story of pioneering work in reconstructing the facial appearance of ancient people. Archaeologist John Prag and medical artist Richard Neave give first-hand accounts of the exciting search for evidence to recreate a likeness and explain the historical circumstances surrounding each body. Some have been victims of sudden death, such as the Minoan priest and priestess crushed in an earthquake while carrying out a human sacrifice around 1700 BC, or 'Lindow Man', the Iron Age body found in a peat bog near Manchester in 1984, himself probably the victim of a sacrifice. Others have died peacefully, like Seianti, an Etruscan woman whose remains are in the British Museum; and some are famous like the great King Midas of Phrygia. Applied also to modern criminal investigations, facial reconstruction brings together the work of numerous specialists ranging from dentists to geneticists, and from archaeologists to radiologists. The important historical implications of their work are no more strongly demonstrated than in their confirmation that the body resting in Tomb II at Verginia was that of King Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great: when the face was reconstructed, the eye-injury received by Philip at Methone was unmistakable. Making Faces takes the reader into byways of forensic study, surgery and folklore and reveals how the art of facial reconstruction has opened up whole new vistas of the past.

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