| The skeletal remains were being translated into a three dimensional computer model, in preparation for virtual flesh being put on the ancient bones.
This particular female enhancement is the result of co-operation between Dundee University and museum staff at Dundee’s McManus Galleries, where the skeletal remains have been part of a static display for several years.
The galleries are to close in October for their own makeover and, in preparation for re-opening after the refurbishment, Dundee museum staff are looking at ways of encouraging more visitors by “reinterpreting” existing exhibits and making them more interesting.
They want to bring history to life, using the Pictish bones to create a vivid picture of a “dead culture”.
With that in mind, they approached Dr Tim Thompson of Dundee University’s Unit of Anatomy and Anthropology, part of the School of Life Sciences.
Dr Thompson can tell quite a lot about a person from very few of their bones and the Pictish woman is a pretty well complete skeleton, though the modern makeover will concentrate on a computer reconstruction of her skull
This will show what her face would have looked like when she was walking around sometime between the fifth and seventh centuries AD.
“I can tell you firstly she was female and was in her late 20s or early 30s when she died. She was small, about 5ft 1. I don’t know how she died, but there was no evidence of trauma.”
The museum’s heritage officer Christina Donald said the Pictish woman was “the best preserved” of one of 17 individuals found during a “rescue excavation” undertaken between the mid 1960s and early 1980s at Lundin Links, where coastal erosion exposed what archaeologists call a long cist (pronounced with a hard c) cemetery, which is a stone-lined burial chamber.
Now the Pictish woman is being given a kind of modern cosmetic surgery to help a 21st century audience picture what she would have looked like and give them the potential to participate in an interactive museum display.
Through his university work, Dr Thompson has links with local firm HyperFocal Ltd, who today digitally scanned the skull to produce three-dimensional images that can be manipulated on the computer screen.
These images will be forwarded to experts at the University of Manchester who are specialists in facial reconstruction. |
