Researchers Recreate Roman Funeral Masks

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—At the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, scholars from Cornell University talked about their experiences of casting life-like wax masks of their own faces. Such masks, or imagines maiorum, were used in ancient Roman funeral processions to represent deceased male ancestors. The beeswax masks would have been expensive to produce and difficult to maintain over successive generations. “They were constantly transformed and probably never looked pristine, and I think probably in the end more like zombies than anything else,” said art historian Annetta Alexandridis.