Vyatichi Woman of the 12th Century. Reconstruction by Mikhail Gerasimov

This is an anthropological reconstruction: the appearance of a woman of the Slavic Vyatichi tribe who lived in the 12th century. It was made by Mikhail Gerasimov (1907–1970), a Soviet anthropologist, archaeologist and sculptor and the author of an original technique for reconstructing the face from the skull, known as the Gerasimov method.

The Vyatichi were an East Slavic tribal union that in the 8th–13th centuries inhabited the basin of the Upper and Middle Oka and the Upper Don. The surroundings of the future Moscow were the northern edge of their settlement, on the border with the lands of the Krivichi. The first written mention of Moscow, in 1147, also falls in the 12th century.

The sculpture dates from the early 1950s; it is cast in plaster in a mould and tinted. From 1950 to 1970 Gerasimov was the first head of the Laboratory of Plastic Reconstruction at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Among his best-known works are reconstructions of the appearance of Yaroslav the Wise (1939) and Ivan the Terrible (1964).