Jon Cotton interviewed by Chris Broughton on 25 July 2011
Curator’s Choice: In his own Words. Jon Cotton, Senior Curator (Prehistory) in the Early London History and Collections department of the Museum of London, chooses the reconstructed head of a prehistoric alien. (Jon Cotton has as far as we know been made redundant in the current cuts - MegP Ed)
"She was found in Shepperton, on the Western fringes of London, dug into the gravel in the remains of an ancient sacred site. Give or take, she’s around 5,500-years-old – Neolithic. We’ve got earlier bodies and human remains, but nothing quite as complete.
That’s down to sheer dumb luck, I think. The soil preservation was good enough for the bones to survive, which was a huge factor in the way we’ve chosen to display her.
It was only when the pathology came in that we saw exactly how we were going to do it - it was an absolute no-brainer. ‘Shepperton Woman’ is the oldest Londoner whose face we could realistically reconstruct.
Caroline Wilkinson - the dental pathologist we got in - does a lot of work for the police on murder and burns victims. Seven or eight out of 10 people recognise their relatives from her reconstructions, so it’s theoretically quite possible that someone who knew this woman would recognise her from the model.
http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/archaeology/art360727
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