ABSTRACT

Betty Pat. Gatliff has described her first venture into the realm of three-dimensional facial reconstruction as detailed below.

My first attempt at facial reconstruction was on the skull of an unidentified Native American male in January 1967. It was accomplished when I worked as a medical illustrator with physical anthropologist Dr. Clyde Snow at the Civil Aeromedical Research Institute at the Federal Aviation Administration in Oklahoma City. Dr. Snow was a consultant with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and the Oklahoma State Medical Examiner’s Office. The unidentified case came from the Medical Examiner’s Office. Dr. Snow asked me to assist by sculpting a face on the skull. As preparation for the assignment, he recommended that I read Chapter IX of Dr. Krogman’s book,

The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine

. In Chapter IX, “From Skull to Head: Restoration of Physiognomic Details,” Krogman writes:

A skull may tell of age, of sex, of race, and thus in part contribute to cranial identification. But it may do more: it may provide a further individualization, for it may give clues as to cephalic identification. This is to say that the dead skull is, in a sense, the matrix of the living head; it is the bony core of the fleshy head and face in life. Upon the cranial framework (which is really subjacent to all soft tissues) we may build bit by bit, until details of physiognomy take shape, and a reasonably acceptable facsimile of a living human head emerges.