The truths behind the masks
A thousand "faces", each with an expression frozen in time and long forgotten, could soon help police fight crime. In the Wits University's School of Anatomical Sciences sits a collection of face masks -1112 of them line the wall of a passageway.This is part of the Raymond Dart collection, made from the faces of the living and the dead.The collection includes a cross section of African faces.Most are casts moulded from living subjects during the Cape to Cairo expedition of 1927-1930. The rest are of Wits students or death masks that Dart and his team moulded from faces on bodies in mortuaries.For a long time the masks were a curiosity, a relic from a bygone era when scientists collected anthropometrics to classify races, but now they will have a new scientific purpose.Facial anthropologist Dr Tobias Houlton believes the masks, some of which are close to 90 years old, can help to improve and validate forensic practices used specifically in facial identification today.One such study will investigate patterns in nasal shape and form, specifically within the African context, to build on studies that have been previously performed within Europe and the US."The nose is an essential part of the face for facial recognition and is a well-=maintained feature present in the casts," said Houlton.Police, he said, would find this information important when compiling an accurate facial reconstruction from a corpse.The best masks, said Houlton, are those that have corresponding skulls in the collection.Through the use of high-definition scanning, Houlton can assess how much the death mask varies from the skull.And the collection could soon have another purpose.There is interest in using the masks to better understand human evolution by tracking facial morphology across Africa.But, for the moment, Houlton is cataloguing the collection and trying to gather historical information about the masks."We need to separate those masks with little information from those that have a lot, probably within a year we will know a lot more," he said...
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