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Faces from the Past: Forgotten People of North America
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About Faces From The Past: Forgotten People Of North
Product Description Once, no humans lived on the continent of North America; then they began to journey, the first migrants arriving perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. When a skeleton from long-ago centuries is discovered, scientists want to study it for information about the person’s life and death, about her or his time and place in history. Sometimes artists are asked to reconstruct faces from the past using copies of their skulls. Then these nameless, unknown people can be "brought back to life"--remembered, and honored. Now, when their skeletons are discovered, their stories can be told. From School Library Journal Gr 5 Up-Beginning with the startling photograph of a partially reconstructed face on the cover, this book effectively brings to life the people of North America forgotten by the history books. Beginning with the oldest existing mummified human remains-a man discovered in Spirit Cave, Nevada, dated to approximately 10,500 years ago-Deem moves forward chronologically to burials belonging to the Monacan tribe of Virginia (1000-1400), a French sailor traveling with La Salle (1686), the forgotten burial of a woman in colonial New York (1742), a rediscovered slave burial ground (1750-1790), and a Mexican soldier killed shortly after the Alamo (1836). He discusses the poor buried in an Almshouse Cemetery (1826-1926), a Buffalo Soldier (1865), and, finally, Chinese Miners in Wyoming (1881). Each chapter highlights the hardships endured by these early Americans as documented by the bones they left behind and interpreted by anthropologists. A thorough explanation of the archaeological techniques used to exhume these forgotten remains is combined with the known history of each period to create a clear picture of the difficult lives the people uncovered in these forgotten burials faced. Further humanizing these forgotten people are the careful facial reconstructions painstakingly rendered by sculptors whose careful, scientific process is outlined in fascinating detail. Deem tactfully addresses the issue of excavating and displaying human remains and gives an emotional resonance to the lives of these early Americans through the inclusion of poems exploring some of the painful aspects of American history. Clear prose, pleasing layout, and crisp photographs combined with subject matter rarely explored in history books make this book an excellent choice for most collections.-Caroline Tesauro, Radford Public Library, VAα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. From Booklist *Starred Review* People live and people die, but once in a while they get to come back to shed light on their origins and societies. Deem, author of the Sibert Honor Book Bodies from the Ice (2008), introduces some of those people, from as far back as 10,000 years ago, buried and rediscovered. Now, their bodies and burial materials are making both historical and scientific contributions, thanks to the archaeologists, anthropologists, and forensic artists examining them. Beginning with the discovery of Spirit Cave Man, who was thought to be a thousand years old and turned out to be 10 times older, and ending with an African American Civil War soldier whose body was nabbed by grave robbers, this describes how the bodies were found, the stories surrounding them, and the science that elucidated them. In fact, this is as much a book about scientific techniques—especially that of facial reconstruction—as it is about history. Whether he is describing how a French sailor under the command of La Salle died in a shipwreck or the way twentieth-century inmates of an almshouse were treated, Deem’s writing is riveting and his research deep. Illustrated with copious photographs and historical artifacts, the design’s only small bump is the way the sidebars sometimes interrupt the flow of the text. Otherwise, a top-notch effort with solid back matter, too. Grades 6-10. --Ilene Cooper
