MAKING FACES: Using Forensic and Archeological Evidence.<i> By John Prag and Richard Neave</i> . <i> Texas A & M University Press: 288 pp., $39.95</i>
What’s in a face? More than meets the eye. Our faces identify us to the world; they are the most important element in the first impressions that we make. Yet outward appearances are frequently no more than skin deep; they tell us little about the real nature of the underlying individual. Masks or windows: Faces can be either and often happen to be both. Still, whatever the case, there’s something satisfying about being able to put a face to a name (or, in the case of forensic identification, vice versa), and that is what “Making Faces” is about.
Leading British experts on the art of re-creating facial features from bone evidence, John Prag and Richard Neave describe how their efforts have led not only to the solution of crimes but also occasionally to the identification of the remains of historical individuals, whether the remains belong to war-scarred Philip II of Macedon or to denizens of a Mycenaean grave site dating to 8 BC.
They are not forensic scientists as such, for forensic investigation deals uniquely with what is preserved, whereas Prag and Neave are concerned with what used to be there before the disappearance or alteration of the soft tissues covering the skull. Much as they would protest, their role is as much artistic as it is scientific. Intuition looms as large as cold reason in the process of building a face onto the bare bones of a skull. I say this entirely without disparagement, for facial reconstruction must be convincing, and this can be achieved only with an artist’s skill.
At the American Museum of Natural History, we have quite a bit of experience in reconstructing the features of our extinct relatives, and there is no doubt that the finest of the reconstructions on display have been done by an outstandingly talented sculptor who, while cleaving to the appropriate features of the skull, eschews some of the scientific niceties, such as painstaking measurements, specified by Prag and Neave. It is his artistry, above all, that makes these long-dead creatures come alive.
Still, science clearly cannot be wholly, or even partly, absent from this endeavor, and it’s obvious that certain rules have to be followed as the bony skeleton is transformed into a human face. In “Making Faces,” Prag and Neave describe two standard approaches to this fleshing-out process. The first involves using established measurements of the face’s average soft tissue thickness at certain spots on the face. There are many: on the jaws, cheekbones, chin and forehead. Nowadays separate thicknesses are used for emaciated, normal and obese subjects. Although it’s next to impossible to tell from the bones, particularly those of the facial skeleton, how heavy an individual was in life, other evidence is sometimes available, such as tissue still adhering to the bones or, in the case of historical people, the sarcophagus size.
Armed with this information, the reconstructor makes an allegedly accurate replica of the skull (any self-respecting paleontologist would be aghast at the quick-and-dirty techniques Prag and Neave specify for molding and casting the originals). Next, wooden pegs, cut to lengths that approximate thicknesses of skin, are stuck on the corresponding points of the skull replica. Finally, the skull is plastered with layers of clay matching the thickness specified by the pegs. The problem with this approach, of course, is that average measurements will never capture the unique contours of an individual face. I can testify from my own experience that, even when employed with artistic flair, this method tends to produce results that have as much in common with sacks of potatoes as with real individuals.
The alternative method requires building up the soft tissues, muscle by muscle and layer by layer, onto the replica of the skull. This is a long, laborious process that demands an intimate acquaintance with variations in the subsurface anatomy of the human face. But the advantage of this over the “peg method” is that the bony structure of the skull really does specify, at least within limits, how the overlying tissues should lie.
Aiming for the best of both worlds, Prag and Neave opt for the muscle-layer approach while using average-tissue-thickness data as a control. Naturally, the reconstruction calls for a high degree of judgment on the part of the reconstructor; but when employed by practitioners such as Prag and Neave, it can produce quite convincing results. Such telling details as lips, ears and fleshy noses may be largely conjectural, but the basic proportions of the face are dictated by bony features although, with age, the soft features sag much faster than the bone underneath.
Interestingly, the overall gestalt of a face, particularly the male’s, is affected considerably by the most superficial (and unreconstructible) feature of all: hair. Many times I have seen a reconstruction grow and become an old friend over a period of weeks, only for it to become instantaneously transformed into a complete stranger when a wig and beard were added.
Prag and Neave entered this rather unusual business because of Neave’s involvement with criminologists, who needed accurate likenesses of decomposed murder victims to identify them. How good such reconstructions need to be is debatable: Friends and family know that an individual is missing, and it may take only a very general resemblance seen on TV to prod them into contacting police. What’s more, broadcasts of such images invariably provoke a flood of police notifications, all of which must be investigated even though most turn out to be false alarms.
Prag and Neave are quite honest about the limitations of their work and disavow any intention of producing an exact portrait of such victims. They also assert how anything that gives a clue to the person’s age or race, other than his or her skull, can support the creation of an effective likeness. Still, it’s clear (and very understandable) that they have difficulty in distancing themselves from the faces that emerge, even after successful identification produces photographic evidence showing the inevitable disparity between victim and reconstruction.
Forensic identification at a crime scene may be good for a headline or two, but it almost invariably lacks the punch of celebrity identification. Prag and Neave have overcome this deficiency by turning their talents toward the reconstruction of famous figures from the ancient past. By now their list of subjects has become stellar indeed, including luminaries such as Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great and himself a man of extraordinary achievement; King Midas of Phrygia (yes, the King Midas who supposedly turned to gold everything he touched); members of one of the founding families of Mycenae (not a bad substitute for the hoped-for discovery of many archeologists, Agamemnon, sacker of Troy); participants in a ritual sacrifice in Minoan Crete; an Etruscan woman whose re-created likeness could be compared with the sculpture on her sarcophagus; and the celebrated Lindow “bog-man,” a young man ritually slaughtered (I could have been spared the details) 2,000 years ago and whose preserved remains were found in 1983 by a company excavating peat moss. Once again, Prag and Neave scrupulously refrain from claiming that the reconstructions exactly reflect the looks of their subjects in life, although they are confident they’ve come close.
Although Prag and Neave claim in “Making Faces” that many of these historical reconstructions were made to identify the occupants of burial chambers, it turns out that no such identifications have come from having reconstructed faces. True, nobody will now dispute that it is indeed the cremated remains of Philip II of Macedon that are lying in a lavishly furnished burial chamber at Vergina in northern Greece. The crucial evidence, however, was furnished by a standard forensic examination of the skull itself, which showed evidence of damage to the right eye socket consistent with the wound that Philip is recorded to have received during the siege of Methone in 354 BC. Scientifically speaking, the facial reconstruction was hardly crucial and, Prag and Neave’s protestations to the contrary, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the real motivation to undertake these reconstructions was simply that it was a neat thing to do (and who would argue with that?).
“Making Faces” is not always easy reading because of an unusually high proportion of convoluted 100-word sentences. What’s more, the rather stiff and pedantic style favored by Prag and Neave belies the intrinsic, if not morbid, fascination of their subject matter, sometimes keeping us at arm’s length from the individuals about whom they write. Nonetheless, the book is a trove of fascinating, if highly miscellaneous, information about the art and history of the ancient Mediterranean region. I would gladly defer to other scholars in challenging the accuracy of the authors’ historical information, although I am sure that the late Wilton Krogman, the “grand old man of forensic anthropology” in the United States and the grandfather of facial reconstruction in this country, would have approached their work with some caution. For there’s little doubt that Krogman would have been surprised to read in these pages that he was a woman (they refer to him as “she”).
And so to the big question. In the end, do we actually know any more about such historical characters as Philip II of Macedon after seeing their faces dimly recreated by such talented artists as Prag and Neave? Much as one might wish otherwise, the answer to this one is surely no. On the other hand, do we feel we know them better as we gaze into their sightless eyes? Well, yes, maybe we do, particularly when the re-creation is life-size and three-dimensional, as in a museum exhibit. It’s in this vein of feeling that “Making Faces’ ” intrinsic fascination lies.
