Meet Delilah: TV series unveils ‘biblical’ faces

Excerpts of article in timesofisrael.com

Four faces reconstructed by scientists from ancient skulls for a new TV series were displayed Thursday in Jerusalem.

The lifelike faces, fashioned from clay by a Canadian forensic artist, are based on the skulls of four people whose remains were unearthed in Israel. They include a male, perhaps a hunter, who lived 6,000 years ago and was buried in a Judean Desert cave; a baby interred inside a vase underneath a Jordan Valley house in the same period; a woman thought to be a Philistine who lived on the coast near Ashkelon 3,000 years ago; and a Galilean male who lived around the time of Jesus.

The four-part series, “Biblical Forensics: Real Faces of the Bible,” will have its first screening on Canadian television this weekend.

The skulls were reconstructed for the show by an Israeli forensic anthropologist, Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University, with the help of technicians using 3D imaging equipment. Victoria Lywood, the forensic artist, then produced clay renderings of what the four might have looked like when they were alive.

The reconstructed faces, which Lywood called “facial approximations” in a nod to the rather inexact business of drawing conclusions about a face based only on a skull, “are made in the same manner that you would use if you found unidentified skeletal remains and the police needed to identify the person,” she said.

“Even though these are archaeological reconstructions, they’ve been done in the same manner as we would use to identify people so that relatives could possibly help give a name to that skeleton,” Lywood said.

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