“If a thief presses an ear against a door or a windowpane, that can be as effective as a fingerprint,” says team member and UCL archaeologist Andrew Bevan. If the terra-cotta warriors portrayed real people, each statue should have distinctively shaped ears.
But taking measurements of the clay ears was a risky proposition. The fragile warriors are packed so tightly in their burial pit that moving among them with calipers could have damaged them. So the team used new digital technology known as structure-from-motion to create precise, three-dimensional reconstructions of the warriors’ ears.
Story: Heather Pringle, National Geographic | Photo: O. Louis Mazzatenta, National Geographic Creative
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