Mary Rose museum brings public face to face with men who sailed her
They were seven crew members among the 400 or so who drowned when Henry VIII's mighty flagship, the Mary Rose, sank so catastrophically 468 years ago and on Thursday they will be revealed for the first time: faces reconstructed from their skulls and skeletons using techniques normally used to identify murder victims.
The men – mostly, as you'd expect, strong and short with terrible teeth – are just one part of the new £27m Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth, which opens to the public on Friday. With the remarkable ship itself at its centre, surrounded by thousands of objects raised from its wreck, it is essentially a vast and fascinating Tudor time capsule.
"It has gone beyond our expectations," said Chris Dobbs who, as an archeologist and scuba diver, signed up to the project in 1979 and is now head of interpretation. "For a lot of us, it was our dream 30 years ago to have the Mary Rose with the conservation finished and in a museum where it could be displayed for ever."
Dobbs is particularly pleased at the wide range of Tudor life and society that the collection is able to shine a light on. "It is not just about guns and warships, it's about people and that's why it is so powerful. People might come expecting guns and admirals but they get the carpenter, the surgeon and the cook, too.
"We've got objects from the whole spread of society, not just the top table. So many palaces and houses and art collections around the world have the things that reflect the upper classes because they are the items that have survived, but we have everyday objects."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/may/30/face-to-face-men-mary-rose
I assume the building which houses it was built round it as opposed to the ship being moved in there. There are lots of other pics if you google Mary Rose.
= new reply since forum marked as read
