ТАТЬЯНА СЕРГЕЕВНА БАЛУЕВА, УЧЕНЫЙ, СОРАТНИК, ДРУГ

Abstract

The article elucidates the contribution of an outstanding Russian anthropol-ogist Tatiana Sergeevna Balueva to the development of skull-based facial recon-struction technique and other fields of anthropological science. The pioneer of the scientific approach to face reconstruction based on the underlying bone struc-tures was a famous anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov who founded the school of anthropological reconstruction in Moscow where in 1950 a laboratory under his guidance was organized in the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. After Gerasimov, the laboratory was guided by his direct student Gali-na Lebedinskaya who also made a significant contribution to the development of skull-based facial reconstruction technique. In 1996, Tatiana Balueva, who had worked under the guidance of Lebedinskaya for along time, succeeded her as the Head of the laboratory.Dr. Balueva, who passed unexpectedly in 2012, left her mark in various fields of anthropology. She led numerous expeditions to remote areas of Siberia. The material collected there became the basis for her dissertation and numerous publications. The anthropological analysis of the data on indigenous peoples of the North-East of Russia shed light on the complex processes of formation of the population of this region.Under her leadership, the Laboratory of Anthropological Reconstruction developed a special program of investigation of the relationship between facial features and the underlying bony framework; its implementation produced a sig-nificant pool of statistical data. The years of research under Balueva’s direction resulted in the program of craniofacial correspondence that significantly clarifies the reconstruction of appearance and allows receiving the lifetime skull-based anthropological description of a face, so-called “physical description on a skull”. During T.S. Balueva’s tenure as the Head of the laboratory the unique collection of sculptural portraits considerably replenished with the works made taking into account improvements of a method.T.S. Balueva authored 64 sculptural reconstructions, over 300 graphic re-constructions, and close to 200 forensic examinations on unidentified skulls. She received international recognition as an expert in craniofacial reconstruction and identification. The list of the main sculptural reconstructions of T.S. Balueva is provided in the appendix.