Press

ALBANY, NY - Experts at the New York State Museum today unveiled Pearl, the facial reconstruction of a Colonial woman based on a skull found in downtown Albany.

She was nicknamed Pearl since her coffin, along with her skull and other bones, were discovered at the corner of Pearl and Howard streets in April 1998 by Museum archaeologists, who monitored the South Pearl Street reconstruction by the state Department of Transportation.

A Face from Colonial Albany will be exhibited in the main lobby of the Museum beginning Dec. 17.

"There is a mystique to Pearl. We don't know all the answers about her life, but she gets more people to think about what it was like to live in upstate New York 250-300 years ago," Director Cliff Siegfried said.

The woman's skull and other bones were found with the remains of two men at the site of a former Lutheran cemetery. They apparently had unmarked graves or only their markers were removed when the cemetery was relocated.

"This woman represents an important group of people in the history of this city -- a female worker not known from historical documents and buried in an unmarked grave," said Museum archaeologist Charles Fisher, who led the project. "The New York State Museum has a long tradition of creating life casts for exhibits. This builds on that tradition and is very exciting because it is based on actual physical remains."

Gay Malin, a museum preparator and sculptor, was given the job of bringing Pearl to life. Drawing from the expertise of State Police forensic experts, researchers at Yale University and paintings from that era, Malin painstakingly reconstructed the woman's face onto a cast of a skull she had taken from the original. She added tissue, muscles and skin using clay and various polymers. A more detailed account of the process can be found at the State Museum's website at www.nysm.nysed.gov/arccrsppearlstfacial.html

"It's a way of bringing a long-forgotten face from the past to life," Malin said. "To see it take shape, to see it go from bone to flesh, was very exciting. It is my hope that someone seeing the reconstruction may recognize her as an ancestor."

Before the cast of the skull was made, archaeologists studied the bones and skull to learn more about the individual.

According to Fisher and other scientists working on the project, Pearl probably died in her early 40s about 250-300 years ago. She was Caucasian and of European ancestry. She stood about 5'1''. Her dental health was extremely poor and she had lost 63 percent of her teeth before death. She had no teeth on either side of her jaw, which was most important because the loss of those teeth would evidence themselves in the final reconstruction as sunken cheeks. Of her remaining teeth, the condition was poor and she had several abscesses.

During her lifetime, she suffered from acute infections, rickets, sinusitis, an upper respiratory infection, arthritis and gout. She was also very muscular because the ridges on her long bones were very developed.

Records regarding the Lutheran cemetery that once occupied that section of South Pearl Street just south of State Street are incomplete and researchers may never know her real name.

The casts will be kept as part of the Museum's collections and will be used in future exhibits and education programs in keeping with the Museum's role within the State Education Department. Pearl's remains were reburied during a ceremony in May with Albany's First Lutheran Church, the oldest congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

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