Death masks were never meant to come off. In the Colombian Andes, some pre-Hispanic communities pressed layers of clay, resin, wax, and maize onto the faces of their dead, sealing them into a ritualized afterlife. Centuries later, those coverings have been virtually peeled away. For the first time, we can stare back at the people beneath.
The four mummies, dating from between the 13th and 18th centuries, include a child of about seven, a woman in her sixties, and two young men. Their tombs were looted long ago, leaving little trace of their lives beyond the broken masks fused to their jaws. Some still carried fragments of ornament, beads once framing their eyes like jewelry for the afterlife.
At Liverpool John Moores University, researchers used CT scans to digitally slice through the masks without touching the remains. “We could effectively unmask the skull digitally by removing the layers containing the mask,” Dr. Jessica Liu, who led the project for the university’s Face Lab, said in a statement. The scans became virtual scaffolds. Onto those, the team sculpted flesh, fat, and muscle, guided by modern anatomical data.
Scientists Digitally Rebuilt Mummies’ Faces After ‘Removing’ Their Death Masks
The process is part science, part art. No contemporary datasets exist for women or children from Colombia, so those reconstructions required manual adjustments, filling out cheeks and shaping muscles until the faces felt proportionate. Bone measurements determined the noses. Skin, eye, and hair tones matched the Indigenous populations of the region.
What followed was the uncanny step: adding pores, wrinkles, and eyelashes. Liu described it as the most difficult part, because the smallest detail tips the image toward the familiar or the unreal. “Texture is always the biggest challenge,” she explained. “What we present in terms of texture is an average representation…but nobody is ever an average.”
The finished faces were unveiled at the World Congress on Mummy Studies in Peru, where researchers called the masks “extraordinary workmanship” and noted that these are the only known examples from Colombia. For centuries, the masks held the mystery of who they concealed. These aren’t exact likenesses, but they pull the dead into focus just enough to make the past feel uncomfortably close.
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