Elongated Skulls: Visualising Ancient People And Their Cultures
In this post, we would like to showcase the brilliant work of several artists and anthropologists who have reconstructed the appearance of ancient people using skulls, mummies, burial masks, images and descriptions as their primary sources. They have envisioned these ancient people in their natural environments, rendering them to us with their understanding of sky and earth, life and death, divinity, beauty and truth.
In addition to the artist’s talent, visualizing and reconstructing ancient cultures requires thorough research and unique technical skills. Successful, methodologically-grounded reconstruction is a truly multidisciplinary task and it is great to see that academic and independent researchers, artists and enthusiasts collaborate in this important endeavour. Fortunately, research on elongated skulls is now greatly facilitated by the digitization of museum and university archives, as well as open-access journals. The growing public interest in ancient cultures and technologies also helps. Independent researchers and enthusiasts, who share interesting photos on social networks, are attracting increasingly large audiences.
Importantly, reconstruction poses multiple ethical challenges. Researchers and artists have to be careful in navigating the ethical dimension while working with such sensitive material as human remains. It is important to be respectful to our ancestors as well as their cultural and biological descendants. Also, the artist must be conscious of various interests and perspectives in modern-day research, which are often competitive and antagonistic in their nature. Finally, reconstructions have to be cutting-edge in terms of available technological tools, meaning that the artist or anthropologist must also be ‘tech savvy’ to achieve the best results.
Mark Laplume is a leading reconstructionist when it comes to elongated skulls. He has done hundreds of reconstructions over the past several years. Much of his startling work can be found on his Facebook community page ‘Root Race Research’.
Marcia K Moore is also known for a number of interpretive reconstructions, including 3D models of the Paracas elongated skulls. We are especially pleased to see various stages of the reconstruction process and several possible interpretations offered by her work. More details about the skulls used in her reconstructions can be found on Brien Foerster’s Hidden Inca Tours, who should also be given credit for many images of the elongated skulls available to the global audience.
Alexey Nechvaloda is another leading expert in this field. As an anthropologist from Ufa, Russia, he has carried out numerous reconstructions of ancient populations of Russia, Kazakhstan, Egypt among others, including reconstructions of the residents of Arkaim.Some of his works can be seen at the Institute of History, Language and Literature of the Ufa Science Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Below is an image of Alexey Nechvaloda with his recent works.
We intend to elaborate this post further when we learn of other contributions in this field. Therefore, we would appreciate if our readers post links to other interesting reconstructions in their comments.
Other posts on elongated skulls and artificial cranial deformation:
{ http://ancientscienceartifacts.org/ }
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