These Colombian Mummies Were Buried with Death Masks Fused to Their Faces. Now, Scientists Digitally Reconstruct Their F

[Judi Lynn]

These Colombian Mummies Were Buried with Death Masks Fused to Their Faces. Now, Scientists Digitally Reconstruct Their Faces After 500 years

Centuries-old mummies are unmasked with 3D scans, revealing faces hidden for hundreds of years.

byTibi Puiu October 3, 2025
Edited and reviewed by Zoe Gordon

For centuries, four mummified individuals from the Colombian Andes lay in museums, their faces sealed under ornate masks. And I mean sealed shut. Now, thanks to cutting-edge digital reconstruction, their identities are flickering back to life. Scientists have virtually “peeled away” the sticky resin, clay, wax, and maize that once cloaked their features, revealing, for the first time in centuries, the faces of a child, an older woman and two young men.

These reconstructions aren’t portraits in the traditional sense though. They’re more like educated guesses: carefully modeled, anatomically faithful, yet hovering somewhere between fidelity and speculation.

“What we present in terms of texture is an average representation, based on what we know of these individuals . . . but nobody is ever an average,” Jessica Liu of Liverpool John Moores University’s Face Lab told Live Science.

Peeling Back the Masks



The faces are presented with neutral expressions. Credit: Face Lab, Liverpool John Moores University. Credit: Facial depictions by Face Lab, Liverpool John Moores University.

The project began with four mummies from the Eastern Cordillera of the Colombian Andes, dating between 1216 and 1797. Each had been buried with a mask molded directly onto the skull, covering face and jaw in such detail that the dead looked nearly lifelike. The masks are unique in Colombia, though the practice was widespread in pre-Columbian South America.

Unfortunately, looting had destroyed the graves’ archaeological context, leaving little to interpret beyond the mummies themselves. But in their remains, scientists saw an opportunity. By running CT scans, they generated 3D models of the skulls beneath the masks. Liu explained that this allowed them to “effectively unmask the skull digitally.”

Using digital sculpting tools, researchers layered muscles, fat, and soft tissue over the scans. For the two men, they used modern data from Colombian adults to calculate tissue depth. The child’s face was rounded with extra fat, while the elderly woman’s features were refined by hand, since comparable datasets don’t exist for children or older women. The noses were reconstructed by measuring bones and matching them to digital archives of possible shapes.

More:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/these-colombian-mummies-were-buried-with-death-masks-fused-to-their-faces-now-scientists-digitally-reconstruct-their-faces-after-500-years/