Oscar Nilsson is a Swedish archaeologist and sculptor who gives faces back to people who died hundreds or thousands of years ago. Working from real skulls found in excavations, he builds each head by hand rather than on a computer, layer by layer, until a recognisable person looks back at you. His studio in Stockholm makes these reconstructions for museums around the world, and a single face can take more than 200 hours.
His subjects range from a Wari noblewoman in Peru and a 9,000-year-old Greek teenager to a Neanderthal from Gibraltar, a Swedish regent and five ordinary people from the Brighton area spanning 4,000 years. Below you will find how the method works, each of the fourteen faces with what archaeologists actually know about the person, a few corrections to details that have circulated online, and an honest look at which parts of a reconstruction are science and which are educated guesswork.
You can see more of his work on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and his studio site, odnilsson.com.
How a face is rebuilt from a skull
Nilsson’s process follows the same forensic principles used to identify unknown bodies, then adds the craft of a portrait sculptor:
- A copy of the skull. The original bones are fragile and often need to stay in a museum, so the skull is scanned and 3D-printed.
- Tissue-depth markers. Small pegs are fixed at standard points, showing how thick the skin and flesh usually are at each spot for a person of that age, sex and build.
- Muscles first. Facial muscles are modelled one by one in clay, following the attachment marks on the bone, before skin is added over them.
- Casting and finishing. The clay head is cast, often in silicone, then painted and given real hair, eyebrows and lashes, inserted strand by strand.
The skull fixes the overall shape of the face: the jaw, cheekbones, nose opening and eye sockets. Bone analysis adds age, health and lifestyle. Ancient DNA, when available, can suggest eye, hair and skin colour. Everything else, such as expression, hairstyle and clothing, comes from archaeological finds and the artist’s judgement.
The Huarmey Queen of the Wari culture
In 2012 Polish and Peruvian archaeologists Miłosz Giersz and Roberto Pimentel Nita found an unlooted royal tomb at El Castillo de Huarmey on Peru’s north coast. It belonged to the Wari, a civilisation that dominated much of the Andes centuries before the Inca, and held the remains of 58 noblewomen, four of them thought to be queens or princesses.
One woman, now called the Huarmey Queen, was at least 60 when she died about 1,200 years ago. She was buried with jewellery, gold ear ornaments, flasks and weaving tools made of gold, and her bones show long hours spent seated with heavy use of the upper body, consistent with weaving. Fine cloth was among the most prized goods in the Andean world, so a master weaver could hold great status.
According to National Geographic, Nilsson spent about 220 hours on her face, working over a 3D-printed skull and using photographs of local Andean people as a reference. For her hair he used real hair from elderly Andean women, bought at a wig market in Peru. The bust went on display at the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw in December 2017.
Five faces of Brighton’s ancestors
Five of the reconstructions were made for the Elaine Evans Archaeology Gallery at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in England, which opened in 2019. Together they show people who lived in the same corner of Sussex across roughly four thousand years.
Whitehawk Woman, Neolithic
She was buried at Whitehawk Camp, a Neolithic causewayed enclosure above Brighton, and carbon dating places her life between about 3650 and 3520 BC. She was only about 1.45 metres tall and between 19 and 25 when she died, and she was buried with a newborn baby, which suggests she may have died during or soon after childbirth. Isotopes in her teeth show she grew up far away, possibly near the Welsh border.
A correction is needed here. Some viral posts claimed that DNA proved she was “not white” and looked like a modern North African. Her own DNA was not well preserved, and genetic studies of Britain’s first farmers trace their ancestry to Anatolia (modern Turkey) by way of mainland Europe, not North Africa. Those farmers are thought to have had dark hair and eyes and, according to some studies, an intermediate to light complexion. Her skin tone in the bust is an informed interpretation, not a measurement.
Bronze Age man, Ditchling Road
This young man was found in a Beaker-culture burial on Ditchling Road in Brighton, dated to around 2287 to 2125 BC, which is older than the “3,700 years” often quoted with this image. Porous bone shows anaemia, and his teeth record several bouts of malnutrition in childhood. He was shorter than average and slightly built, and Nilsson gave him fair hair, blue eyes and a rather sickly look.
Iron Age man, Slonk Hill
Found at Slonk Hill near Shoreham and dated to about 393 to 206 BC, he was a muscular man. Plaque on his teeth and traces of charcoal suggest he lived and worked in very smoky surroundings, perhaps as a metalworker. Online captions describing his age at death as mid-twenties to early thirties and his gap-toothed smile could not be confirmed from the museum’s published notes.
Romano-British woman, Patcham
This woman lived in Patcham, on the edge of modern Brighton, sometime between about AD 210 and 356. Her skeleton shows a life of hard physical work and extensive arthritis, though she was still fairly young when she died. Most strikingly, she was buried with an iron nail driven into the back of her skull. Nails in Roman-era burials are sometimes interpreted as protection against the dead returning, but the reason in her case is not known.
Anglo-Saxon man, Stafford Road
He was buried on Stafford Road between about AD 424 and 570 with a knife and spear, a typical warrior burial of the period. Several dental abscesses left marks on his jaw, and blood poisoning from those infections probably killed him.
Medieval Switzerland and Sweden
Adelasius Ebalchus
Found in one of 47 early medieval graves at Grenchen in northern Switzerland, this young man lived around AD 700 and died aged roughly 19 to 22. He suffered from chronic osteomyelitis, a bone infection, along with vitamin deficiencies, which together probably caused his early death. Yet his teeth were remarkable; Nilsson told National Geographic, “I’ve never seen more even or perfect teeth,” which is why the bust smiles. His Latin-sounding name was chosen by archaeologists to reflect a time when Roman and Germanic cultures were mixing in the region.
Estrid Sigfastsdotter
Estrid was a wealthy landowner in Uppland, near today’s Stockholm, in the 11th century. Around five or six runestones mention her, recording two marriages, several sons, and her grandson, the chieftain Jarlabanke, who helped her clear a road and build bridges at Täby. One husband, Östen, travelled towards Jerusalem and died in the Byzantine Empire.
In 1995 excavations at Broby bro found the grave of a very old, wealthy woman beside Östen’s burial mound, probably hers. Her long life also corrects a common myth: Viking Age “life expectancy” figures of 30 to 40 years are dragged down by high child mortality, and adults who survived childhood often lived well into old age.
A Viking Age man
This Swedish man lived in the 11th century, and his reconstruction was one of the first of a Viking to use ancient DNA, analysed by geneticists and osteologists at Stockholm University, to choose his colouring. The results pointed to blue eyes, light skin and strawberry-blond hair. He reportedly died at around 45.
Birger Jarl
Birger Magnusson, known as Birger Jarl, was formally made jarl of Sweden in 1248 and ruled as regent for his son, King Valdemar, from about 1250 until his death on 21 October 1266 at Jälbolung in Västergötland. Tradition credits him with founding Stockholm, which he first mentions in letters of 1252. His grave at Varnhem Abbey was reopened in 2002, and the bones suggested he was about 50 when he died, younger than once believed, which gave a solid basis for a portrait.
A late medieval archer
Nilsson originally described this man from central Sweden as medieval, but radiocarbon results placed him between 1470 and 1630. His shoulder showed os acromiale, a bone condition linked to heavy, repeated longbow use. Since the longbow fell out of use during the 16th century, Nilsson suggested narrowing his lifetime to about 1470 to 1540.
Deep time: Neanderthals and the first farmers
A Neanderthal woman from Gibraltar
The skull known as Gibraltar 1 was presented to the Gibraltar Scientific Society in March 1848, years before the famous Neander Valley find gave Neanderthals their name. It belonged to an adult woman. It was found without any record of its layer, so it cannot be dated precisely; figures of 40,000 to 50,000 years are estimates.
Nilsson wrote that while he worked he kept asking himself, “How ‘human’ should this face appear?” He decided she needed a human glimpse in her eyes, noting that people of non-African descent still carry a small share of Neanderthal DNA, usually estimated at around 2 per cent. The result reflects how our picture of Neanderthals has moved from brutish cave dweller to capable, closely related cousin.
Avgi, a Mesolithic teenager from Greece
Avgi’s bones were found in the 1990s in Theopetra Cave in Thessaly, central Greece, a site with one of the longest archaeological sequences in Greece. She was about 18 when she died roughly 9,000 years ago, around 7000 BC, as hunter-gatherer life in the region was giving way to farming. The project was led by orthodontist Manolis Papagrigorakis with a team of medical specialists, and Nilsson sculpted the face, unveiled at the Acropolis Museum in Athens in January 2018. Her name means “dawn” in Greek, fitting for someone who lived at the dawn of agriculture.
A Neolithic man
Here Nilsson adds final touches to the face of a man described in the original caption as a slender adult aged 25 to 40, born about 5,500 years ago, in the early Neolithic. The photo is a good reminder of how hands-on the work is: every wrinkle and hair is placed by the sculptor. Details about where this man was found were not given with the image and could not be confirmed.
How accurate are facial reconstructions?
Reconstructions are among the most popular exhibits in any museum, and for good reason: a face turns a box of bones into a person. But it helps to know what is solid and what is interpretation.
- Most reliable: the overall proportions of the face, the shape of the jaw and forehead, the position of the eyes, and signs of age, illness or injury written into the bones.
- Reasonably informed: eye, hair and skin colour when good ancient DNA exists, and less certain when it is borrowed from other people of the same period.
- Educated guesswork: the exact shape of the ears and nose tip, hairstyle, facial expression, weight and clothing.
Viewed that way, Nilsson’s busts are best understood as careful portraits built on evidence, not photographs. Their real value is the curiosity they spark: people stop, look a Neolithic mother or a medieval archer in the eye, and want to know how they lived.
Sources: National Geographic: Wari noblewoman’s face reconstructed (13 December 2017); Brighton & Hove Museums: Whitehawk Woman; Current Archaeology: Meeting Brighton’s ancestors; National Geographic: Adelasius Ebalchus (May 2019); Smithsonian: Avgi; Wikipedia: Estrid Sigfastsdotter; Wikipedia: Birger Jarl; Wikipedia: Gibraltar 1; Wikipedia: Early European Farmers; ZME Science: The faces of the past; My Modern Met. Reconstructions and photos: Oscar D. Nilsson.
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