Why The Rynn Approach Matters
Rynn’s methodological choice to minimize contextual knowledge before beginning the reconstruction — to let the skull speak for itself rather than being guided by expectations about what a person from this background should look like — is worth reflecting on as a principle of the practice.
Forensic facial reconstruction in forensic police work operates on exactly this principle: the reconstructor typically does not know (and should not be told) who the police think the remains belong to, because knowing the suspected identity could bias the reconstruction toward the expected appearance. The reconstruction should be based on the skull, not on the investigator’s hypothesis.
This principle translates naturally to archaeological reconstruction. If a reconstructor approaches a skull knowing it comes from population X, and has a mental model of what people from population X look like, there is a risk that the reconstruction will reflect that mental model as much as it reflects the skull’s actual geometry. The result would not be wrong in the sense of being deliberately falsified; it would be biased in the subtle, often unconscious way that all human perception is susceptible to.
For the Punín-2 skull — which had been at the center of a controversy about whether it showed Oceanic, archaic, or straightforwardly Native American ancestry — this concern was particularly acute. A reconstructor who approached the skull with knowledge of the Oceanic ancestry hypothesis might, consciously or not, look for features in the skull that supported or undermined that hypothesis, and might produce a reconstruction that reflected those expectations.
By approaching the skull with minimal preconceptions about its origin, Rynn ensured that the face he produced was based on what the skull was, not on what he expected it to be. The fact that the result looked “distinctly Indigenous American” was then genuinely informative — it was what the skull, examined without those preconceptions, produced.
The correction of the eye placement — based on local guidance about Indigenous Andean facial characteristics — then refined the result in a way that is different in kind: not the application of a preconception about what the skull should look like, but the application of specific local knowledge about what the actual population of this region looks like. The distinction matters because the local knowledge is empirical knowledge about the appearance of the living descendants, not an assumption about what a skull from a particular background “should” produce.
The combination — blind reconstruction from skull geometry, followed by culturally informed refinement of specific details — represents a sophisticated approach to the problem of how to produce an accurate reconstruction without letting assumptions drive the result.