Sculptor re-creating face of colonist found in Texas

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Little is known about French colonists who lived along the Gulf Coast south of Victoria in the 1680s.
But visitors to Victoria College's Museum of the Coastal Bend will get a chance to see what one of these early settlers looked like.

This week, forensic sculptor Amanda Danning is re-creating the face of Marquis de Sablonniere, whose remains were found in 2000. Some of his bones were unearthed in an archaeological excavation of the site of Fort St. Louis, a short-lived French colony established in 1685.

After study by the Texas Historical Commission, the bones came to the Museum of the Coastal Bend, which is the temporary repository for all Fort St. Louis artifacts, said Director Sue Prudhomme.

 "We're the final resting site for the remains before they are re-interred," she said. Eventually, the bones will probably be buried in a Victoria cemetery, Prudhomme said.

Archaeologists found enough of Sablonniere's facial bones to allow reconstruction, using plastic replicas of the actual bones, she said. The first step in making the plastic bones was painstaking work to take X-rays and CT scans of the real bones.

That work was done by Dr. Bruce Tharp, a radiologist at Citizens Medical Center, and Stephen Cooper, director of the hospital's radiology program. 

Using those images, plastic bones were made at a medical imaging company in Denver, which put them together into a full skull, Prudhomme said.

The completed skull arrived back at the museum on May 2, just in time for Danning to start her work of adding the muscle and connective tissue to create Sablonniere's face. Based on studies using live people, the forensic sculptor has been shown to have an 87 percent recognition rate, Prudhomme said.
Danning, who lives in Columbus, has done work for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, Sam Houston Memorial Museum, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamations and the Buffalo Soldier National Museum.

She will be working on the reconstruction through May 10 at the museum, 2200 E. Red River in Victoria. The museum is open 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. each day. The cost is only paying what you want.
May 10 is Forensics Day at the museum, with activities geared to children and families. 

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