PAST CRIMESbirthmarks or scars. Not all muscles attach directly to facial bones, and can
vary a great deal between individuals. Nasal bones are often missing, and even
when present, cannot accurately predict the shape and size of the whole nose.
Age, ethnicity, and health status can all affect a person’s appearance in ways
which may not be visible from the bones alone. There are also problems about
which sets of data are applied–various sets exist across the world and they do
not all agree. And the person creating the reconstruction may also (not
necessarily intentionally) affect the results through their own sense of
aesthetics or even emotional response to the subject. As a result, different
faces could easily emerge from the same skull if reconstructed by different
people in different places.^11 Facial reconstruction is an art, rather than a
science.
Despite the drawbacks, facial reconstructions can be useful for police and
disaster investigators. For archaeologists, they can at least provide a possible
image of the person under study, as has been done forŐtzi–the mummified
body found in an Alpine glacier in 1991–or the Iron Age man found in a bog
at Lindow Moss.
Another area of work that has been carried out in the last decade or two is
investigation into forms of judicial punishment, with excavations of execution
sites and cemeteries, gaols and penal settlements. German and Dutch
researchers have been studying execution sites and what they can tell us about
the brutality of punishments during the medieval and early modern periods;
American forensic anthropologists have studied Civil War prison camps, gaols
associated with the black slave trade, and early prisons and lockups in
colonial settlements; and Australian archaeological work has been carried out
on the convict settlements and prisons set up in the nineteenth century to hold
the criminals sentenced to transportation by British courts. All these studies
are shedding extra light on history, sometimes confirming the historical
accounts, and sometimes proving them to be inaccurate or incomplete.
Historical research
Historical accounts and documentary sources of evidence are used by both
archaeologists and criminal investigators. Archaeologists study accounts of
historical events, wills, estate plans, old maps, drawings and letters to gather
clues about locations and the activities that have gone on in them, which may
help to locate particular structures, or to interpret artefacts and earthworks.
Crime investigators study evidence such as suicide notes, fraudulent
documents, altered wills, receipts and other material to support or destroy
alibis, and many more examples. Printers, typewriters and handwriting can be