Faces of Scottish People From the Middle Ages Recreated With Astonishing Accuracy

Meet a woman, a priest and a bishop from medieval Scotland. Their faces couldn’t get more real.

In 1957, workmen waterproofing a church in Whithorn, Scotland, discovered three stone coffins in a medieval crypt. The archaeological excavations revealed that one of them contained the remains of Bishop Walter, who was in office from 1209 to 1235. The other two, as it turned out, held the bones of a monk and a young woman of high rank for centuries, Live Science reported.

With help from archaeologists at the University of Badford, forensic anthropologist Christopher Rynn recently completed a reconstruction of the faces of these three individuals as part of the Cold Case Whithorn project, which aims to uncover more of Scotland’s medieval history.

“I didn’t want these faces to look like a digital sculpture, so when it came to the muscles, I sculpted them in wax and then 3D scanned them the same way that the skull was scanned,” Rynn said in a video presentation about the project. “I made it look like a person by adding photographic textures, which is a process of selecting photographs of several different people that look similar to the 3D model and then projecting it onto the skull.”

The result? Three remarkably lifelike 3D reconstructions of people who lived in Scotland 700 years ago. A woman, a priest and a bishop. Using artificial intelligence, Rynn reanimated them, making them move, blink and even smile – as if they were still alive.

“The skulls were really interesting to work on side by side because one of them, the priest with the cleft lip and palate, is the most asymmetrical skull I’ve ever worked on,” Rynn said. “The other, the young woman, is the most symmetrical skull I’ve worked on.”

“The chance to see and imagine that we can hear these three people from so many centuries ago is a remarkable way to help us understand our history and ancestry,” Julia Muir-Watt, development manager for The Whithorn Trust, told BBC News.

“It’s always a challenge to imagine what life was really like in medieval times, and these reconstructions are a brilliant way to engage with who these people from our past really were, of their everyday lives, their hopes and their beliefs.”