If somebody had already dug up my grandpa, and wanted to know more about who he was, where he came from, and what era his bones were laid to rest - I’d have no problem with that.
Am I a monster?
I understand that other people get really worried about bones. Groups like the ancient Egyptians took it to crazy and beautiful excess. Western people today spend enormous amounts of money and waste lots of valuable land for their dead.
I don’t understand why we can’t agree that it’s silly, at least once the mourning is over. Jim Morrison’s grave benefits nobody but the tourist trade, and neither does my grandfather’s.
The first stage involved plotting dozens of points on a cast of the skull and marking the depth of tissue at those points. (Forensic anatomists had collected tissue-depth data over the years, first by pushing pins into the faces of cadavers, and later by using ultrasound and CT scans.) With the points gridded out, a forensic sculptor layered clay on the skull to the proper depths.
The naked clay head was then taken to StudioEIS in Brooklyn, which specializes in reconstructions for museums. There, sculptors aged his face, adding wrinkles and a touch of weathering, and put in the scar from the forehead injury. Using historic photographs of Ainu and Polynesians as a reference, they sculpted the fine, soft-tissue details of the lips, nose and eyes, and gave him a facial expression—a resolute, purposeful gaze consistent with his osteobiography as a hunter, fisherman and long-distance traveler. They added a beard like those commonly found among the Ainu. As for skin tone, a warm brown was chosen, to account for his natural color deepened by the harsh effects of a life lived outdoors. To prevent too much artistic license from creeping into the reconstruction, every stage of the work was reviewed and critiqued by physical anthropologists.
That actual model shown is made of clay, so the beard looks full but it’s just shaped clay. Other modelling methods go a step further using real hair to get the more realistic scraggley look men strive for and women covet in their manly man.
There was an old tire shop and gas station off of I-15. I limped in on a spare and noted the special site sign at the offramp: “Calico Man.” Discovering the tire shop abandoned, I inquired at the station but I never saw his face. Just a newspaper.
“Tires?”
“Barstow.”
That, to the best of my knowledge, is the extent of Calico Man’s vocabulary.
The same thing more recent Native Americans used? I’ve read some tribes plucked facial hair. My impression was that Native Americans typically had East Asian-like facial hair; typically concentrated in the moustache and goatee, usually thin or absent on the sides, sometimes thin or absent everywhere. Googling around a bit though, it seems some of the north-west coastal tribes had full beards though, so it might be reasonable.
As a teenager, I once had a behind the scenes tour of the National Museum of Natural History’s forensic anthropology section (Like Bones, but without anything that makes it telegenic). It was mentioned that in many countries, burial sites are leased on a fixed term basis, rather than perpetual, and this occasionally this allows for research opportunities,
