NOVA Online | Mystery of the First Americans

Kennewick Man bearing many of the 18 major muscles that Gerasimov-style artists fit to a face.

Meet Kennewick Man
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The Gerasimov method aims to produce a very specific image, one as close to that of the deceased as possible. Practitioners of this school, who tend to have an extensive background in osteology and anatomy, begin by closely studying the bones of the face, and observing asymmetries in bone structure and variations in the development of muscle markings. These are clues to the personal characteristics of the dead. Heavily used muscles, for example, leave prominent spurs or ridges in facial bone and show what expressions the person most often held.

Next, after placing the tissue thickness markers, the Gerasimov-style artist fashions 18 major muscles from clay and places them on the face according to their standard thickness in human beings. These include the oval sphincters that surround the mouth and eyes, the massive muscles that close the jaws, and the delicate muscles that manipulate the corners of the mouth and wrinkle the brows and nose. Once these are in place, the face begins to take on a human look, albeit a macabre one. Using the muscles now as a secondary superstructure, the artist lays a thin clay "skin" over the face to the height of the tissue markers, taking into account the topography created by the musculature. The resultant face is immediately quite life-like and gives the artist less latitude in crafting the finished face.

Jim Chatters (partly hidden) and Thomas McClelland put the finishing touches on their creation.

As with the American school, the sculptor ages and lines the face following advice from the team's scientific members, taking cues from the asymmetries and markings noted in the initial inspection of the skull. In the case of Kennewick Man, evidence for severe injuries suggested that the man lived many of his 40-plus years in frequent if not chronic pain. Prominent muscle markings above the chin and beneath the eye sockets confirmed this, revealing a face held in an expression of determined endurance. For this reason, our approximation of Kennewick Man, which we created in about three days using the Gerasimov method, shows the weariness of a middle-aged man in perpetual discomfort.

Like the American method, the Gerasimov approach has proved useful for forensic identification, but its best application is for approximating the appearance of the long dead. Forensic anthropologists ordinarily rely on this method for recreations of our earlier hominid ancestors. Well-known examples include the Homo erectus created by museum artist John Gurche of the Denver Museum of Natural History and the Neanderthal approximation crafted by Gary Sawyer, a preparator at the American Museum of Natural History. Because we have no artistic standards for how these hominids looked, approximators must produce them with as much scientific rigor as possible.

Nearly complete, Kennewick Man shows a middle-aged man in chronic discomfort.

As well founded in science as they may be, facial approximations, as their name suggests, are not literal portraits of the dead. No means yet exist for doing that. Nevertheless, approximations constitute the only way we have of gazing at our early ancestors and thereby seeing them as vital beings like ourselves.

James C. Chatters is an affiliate research associate professor at Central Washington University and owner of an archeological and paleoecological consulting firm in Richland, Washington. The anthropologist who recovered and first studied Kennewick Man, he is the author of a forthcoming book on how that discovery is changing our image of the first Americans (to be published by Simon and Schuster in early 2001).

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