UK researchers reconstruct man's face 700 years after his death

The face of a Cambridge man who died over 700 years ago has been reconstructed as part of a project to gain insights into how the poor lived in the city in medieval times.

The man who lived in the 13th century, has been dubbed Context 958 by researchers. He was among the hundreds whose remains were recovered from a graveyard under what is now the Old Divinity School of St John's College.

The cemetery, which was attached to a hospital and independent charitable foundation for the poor and infirm between 1200 and 1500 AD, was one of the largest medieval hospital cemeteries in the UK at the time.

Archaeologists and other specialists have been seeking new information on the poor who lived in the city, about whom there is little documentary evidence.

Prof John Robb, of the department of archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge University, said, ''We really don't know much about ordinary poor medieval people and their lives. Most work has focused either on upper middle classes or on celebrity bodies such as Richard III, The Guardian reported.

''Studying the skeletons of the unwashed masses thus has potential to tell us lots of things we would never learn from the written record.''

"Context 958 was probably an inmate of the Hospital of St John, a charitable institution which provided food and a place to live for a dozen or so indigent townspeople – some of whom were probably ill, some of whom were aged or poor and couldn't live alone," Phys.org quoted Robb, .

"Context 958 was over 40 when he died, and had quite a robust skeleton with a lot of wear and tear from a hard working life. We can't say what job specifically he did, but he was a working class person, perhaps with a specialised trade of some kind," said Robb.

"One interesting feature is that he had a diet relatively rich in meat or fish, which may suggest that he was in a trade or job which gave him more access to these foods than a poor person might have normally had. He had fallen on hard times, perhaps through illness, limiting his ability to continue working or through not having a family network to take care of him in his poverty."