A "powerful, maybe even frightening" woman buried with a silver diadem in Bronze Age Spain now has a virtually reconstructed face that shows her wearing a serene expression and huge hoop earrings dangling from earplugs.

Earlier this year, researchers announced they had discovered the woman's and a man's remains interred together in a large ceramic pot buried in what was likely an ancient palace.

Now, using the partial skull and jewelry from the burial, a scientific Illustrator has digitally recreated the woman's face, as well as the faces of others buried at the site, known as La Almoloya.

"The biggest challenge about this facial reconstruction was that the upper portion of her skull did not survive the ages," Joana Bruno, ​​the freelance scientific illustrator who created the digital reconstructions and a collaborator with the La Almoloya archaeologists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science in an email.

Her lavish burial goods — including the diadem, beaded necklaces, silver-crafted rings, bracelets, spiral hairpieces and earplugs with spirals, as well as a silver-rimmed drinking pot and silver-handled awl, a tool used to piece textiles — are of superior quality and are more valuable than goods buried with the man, researchers previously told Live Science.

When Bruno decided to digitally recreate the woman's face, it was in part due to the site's impressive preservation of many of its original inhabitants.

"This information is always taken into account when producing the face reconstruction," Bruno said.

Later, to "flesh out" the face, Bruno relies on published techniques for the speculative process of estimating the position of facial features, such as the eyes, nose and mouth, and determining the thickness of the tissues, she said.

"The earlobes were a more straightforward decision," Bruno said.

I used laser scans of the earplugs and the diadem in the face reconstruction.".

The entire process and Bruno's collaboration with anthropologists highlights "the ability to estimate and 'rebuild' missing skeletal portions with the highest possible accuracy and without damaging the original," Cristina Rihuete Herrada, a professor of archaeology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a co-researcher of the 2021 study, told Live Science in an email.

Bruno is now creating archaeological reconstructions of other El Argar people from La Almoloya "using the faces I reconstructed from their skulls, and including the information generated by the archaeological and genetic research," she said.