alt Hacker News> Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best.
The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
Do we know for a fact in these reconstructions there is no input whatsoever from artists? I know, for example, that paleo-artists are responsible for the reconstruction of what dinosaurs are currently thought to have looked like, and they are mostly artists that work in collaboration with scientists directing their work. Why do we think this is not the case for the reconstruction of colors of Roman statues?
> The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.