Facial reconstruction of a deformed skull from the Roman period of Juliopolis

Abstract

AbstractThe use of digital technologies in archaeological research has become considerably more widespread in recent years. While the earliest records of the use of electronic data in archaeology date from the 1950 and 1960s, the field has kept growing with the increasing interest in digital tools such as digital photography, three-dimensional imaging, GIS, virtual and artificial reality applications, CAD and facial reconstruction. Such digitization practices are used frequently for documenting, record keeping, and preserving and representing the data recovered from archaeological contexts, and are linked to other fields, such as cultural heritage studies and museology. Facial reconstruction is used to recreate the faces of individual from the past using their skeletal remains. It has been practiced for different reasons in the fields of forensics, anthropology, and archaeology. This study focuses on the facial reconstruction of a skull unearthed from Juliopolis. The reason for choosing this skull in this study is that it is the first and only known deformed skull dated to the Roman period in Anatolia. For the facial reconstruction application, authors created a 3D modelling of the skull by photogrammetry. Then, the missing parts of the skull are completed using the virtual donor library. The results are presented in different forms, as grayscale, in colour with eyes closed or open. Also, the type of deformation is demonstrated in the skull. This study adopts a digital process and is more strongly linked to data interpolation related to the external surface of the face. The prominent advantage of the methodology is being strongly supported by information obtained from computed tomography (CT) scans of living individuals, leaving a little room for the artistic issue in relation to the basic aspect resulting from the interpolation of data. The benefit of facial reconstruction is especially important since it is a way of preserving and presenting archaeological and anthropological data.