These are reconstructions I did of five female subjects of color from various periods in human prehistory. I used photographs of skulls obtained from anthropological papers and articles as references for the subjects’ facial features, and I used my artistic skills and the program Clip Studio Paint to bring these remains to life. In addition, I used Photoshop to assemble comparisons between each reconstruction and the original skull or skeletal material.

A major source of inspiration for this project of mine was the reconstructions on the website "Ancestral Whispers", although I felt they tended to “whitewash” their subjects and represent them almost always as male. You can consider these five reconstructions of mine as a less Eurocentric and less male-centric corrective to the ones on Ancestral Whispers.

These are the publications from whence the images of skulls were obtained:

Ejsmond, Wojciech & Ożarek-Szilke, Marzena & Jaworski, Marcin & Szilke, Stanisław. (2021).

A pregnant ancient egyptian mummy from the 1st century BC. Journal of Archaeological Science. 132. 10.1016/j.jas.2021.105371.

Hershkovitz, I., & Arensburg, B. (2017). Human Fossils from the Upper Palaeolithic through the Early Holocene. In Y. Enzel & O. Bar-Yosef (Eds.), Quaternary of the Levant: Environments, Climate Change, and Humans (pp. 611–620). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316106754.068

Lee, W. J., Shinde, V., Kim, Y. J., Woo, E. J., Jadhav, N., Waghmare, P., Yadav, Y., Munshi, A., Panyam, A., Chatterjee, M., Oh, C. S., Hong, J. H., Wilkinson, C. M., Rynn, C., & Shin, D. H. (2020). Craniofacial reconstruction of the Indus Valley Civilization individuals found at 4500-year-old Rakhigarhi cemetery. Anatomical science international, 95(2), 286–292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12565-019-00504-3

Robert J. Meier, Mohamed Sahnouni, Mohamed Medig, Abdelkader Derradji. Anthropologischer Anzeiger, Jahrg. 61, H. 2 (Juni 2003), pp. 129–140

McEnchroe, T. (2022, January 20). Black woman’s skull found in medieval burial ground in Bohemia. Radio Prague International. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://english.radio.cz/black-womans-skull-found-medieval-burial-ground-bohemia-8739771