Red pigment and silver mining

As I get ready to head to San Diego at the weekend for the World Mummy Congress, I am reflecting on all the places our University of Illinois mummy has taken me.

One of the strangest: the world of pigment analysis. Our red stucco covering was analyzed twice, once by a lab at the U of I, and the second time by the Getty Conservation Institute. Both times, lead oxide was identified. This is interesting because you might expect an iron oxide for the color red. But red lead, or minium, was popular in antiquity, and that is what our pigment turns out to be. Even better, the Getty researchers linked the composition to that of nine other Roman period mummies from Egypt, and to the source: the silver mine of Rio Tinto in Spain.

Why is this so cool? Because it provides additional evidence that our little mummy, a child of perhaps mixed parentage who lived in Roman Egypt, came from a relatively well-to-do family. Not only did he or she have parent who could afford exotic ingredients like minium and gold leaf for the mummy wrappings, but the portrait was originally very detailed and probably gorgeous to look at. Take a look on our website, and check out the wonderful new book on Herakleides by Lorelei Corcoran and Marie Svoboda on the red shroud mummy group.

Mummies, clogged arteries, and child abuse

Recently two good articles have popped up: one on clogged arteries in Egyptian  mummies, and one on using imaging to detect child abuse.

In the first, we read that atherosclerosis is not as uncommon in earlier societies as we thought. Egyptian mummies show the disease, despite consuming a mostly vegetarian diet and not using tobacco. The article points out that we must be missing a risk factor in heart disease--clogged arteries must not be only a result of poor choices in diet but other conditions (such as inflammation) or things we have not yet identified.

The second article points out how medical imaging of ancient bodies can teach us something about the present. The CT scan of a mummy with a damaged head led to a three-dimensional reconstruction that produced insights on modern deaths due to child abuse. As one of the medical team pointed out, it was helpful that the mummy experiment was performed on a long-dead body so that high dose X-rays could be used. Similarly, in our recent CT scan of the University of Illinois Egyptian mummy, we used more radiation than a living patient could tolerate. Result: gorgeous, high definition images that show more damage to our mummy's skull than before. However, we don't know whether the damage occurred before or after death...lots more work ahead.

The Austrian Iceman

My day job is archaeology, which means I tend to think in layers and I love dirt—both real dirt as in soil, and “dirt” as in good stories about squabbling academics trying to steal each other’s research. Fortunately for me, the archaeological profession is full of multilayered, dirty stories, just like the strata of an excavation.

Take the Iceman, the mummified Neolithic man found in a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. His story has at least three layers: his life in ancient times, his discovery about fifteen years ago, and the saga of the international investigation and border dispute over his body.

When Ötzi, as he is now known, was discovered, his finders thought he was just another dead hiker who’d strayed off the trail in bad weather. Granted, he was a bit leathery-looking, but the folks who ripped him out of the ice and hauled him away (leaving a couple of crucial body parts behind) hadn’t a clue they’d just found one of the most sensational archaeological discoveries of all time.

Ötzi was alive 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists have reconstructed his equipment: he carried a knapsack and a medicine bag, and wore an ingenious set of leggings and a warm, furry cloak. He also had a knife, bows and arrows, and a fire-making kit. But who was he? Where did he come from, and where was he going? Despite the best techniques known to science, many questions about Ötzi remained unanswered.

Archaeologists know the kind of settlement he came from, but not which one. They say that he was probably an important man in Neolithic society, but no one knows his name or family. And everyone thought he died in a blizzard until new imaging revealed an arrowhead in his shoulder—poor Ötzi was shot from behind. Then someone—the murderer?—removed the arrow, moved the body, and the evidence of the crime was covered up by 5,000 years of glaciers and silence.

The intrigue doesn’t stop there. Scientists and archaeologists from several countries collaborated in the modern studies of the Iceman’s tissues, tattoos, and diet. Did they all get along as well as the news media claimed? Or were some researchers angered as others published their findings in prestigious journals and appeared on Nova? And since the Iceman was found near the border between Austria and Italy, officials from both countries argued over who would ultimately own the mummy and build the museum to display him.

Italy won. Two years ago, I visited Ötzi in his new home in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. He’s resting in a special climate-controlled case looking very small and lonely. Although the museum has done a great job of displaying the scientific and archaeological account of his death, a good mystery writer needs to tell the story of his life. Takers, anyone?

Introducing The Mummy Blog

Was it a boy or a girl? How old? Who were his or her parents? What did he or she eat? How did the person live and die in Roman Egypt? These are only a few of the questions you can ask about an Egyptian mummy.

My name is Sarah Wisseman. I am a mummy enthusiast, archaeologist, and mystery writer. Since my colleagues and I have just CT-scanned our Egyptian mummy at the University of Illinois for the second time (after a twenty year gap), I've decided to start a blog that brings together all my interests together in one place.

A mummy is inherently interesting and mysterious since it contains secrets about a person's life and death inside its wrappings. Although Egyptian mummies are the most familiar, there are also Chinchorro mummies in Chile, Peruvian Ice Maidens, the Diva Mummy ("Lady Dai") in China, bog bodies (Denmark and Germany), Canary Island mummies, and many more.

The study of mummies seduces anthropologists and museum curators, but also paleopathologists, dentists, physicians, biochemists, textile scientists, and entomologists. When we are allowed to take samples from ancient bodies, we can learn about DNA, diet, disease, tissue preservation, ritual burial, and religious practices. Although the body is important to science because of what it can reveal about ancient health and disease, the materials used, the decorations and symbols on the wrappings, the burial position, and the accompanying artifacts can teach us so much about lifestyle and belief systems.

And the fascination for mummies can take you strange places--in my case, all the unanswered questions about our mummy made me write a mystery novel, Bound for Eternity. A museum curator discovers that an Egyptian mummy holds the clues to two murders in her Boston museum...a story that continues in several other books and short stories: www.sarahwisseman.com