Mummy Mavens Unwrap Preservation Methods

In 1994 researchers made a mummy. Now scientists have reverse engineered the process to figure out how it's done, with the mummy makers still around to tell them how they did. Cynthia Graber reports.

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. They’re the stuff of horror movies and happy . Now the American Association of Anatomists have turned their attention to mummies—they’ve devoted the , to the subject. 

Papers in the edition cover topics such as the , the , a case study for an , and a for research with ancient human remains.

Most mummy research is done on actual discovered remains, but some investigations try to reconstruct mummification techniques to figure out just how ancient peoples did it. For example, in 1994 researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore attempted to recreate Egyptian mummification, using a donated cadaver. In a paper in the new mummy issue, scientists conducted a variety of scans on that cadaver to see if they could figure out the process without asking the researchers who did the 1994 work.

They determined that the body was male, likely elderly, and probably a modern professional in the “middle or elite social class.” The authors also describe the incisions and the embalming materials that they could ascertain from the scans. They then took the results to the original embalmers, who deemed their findings to be largely correct. [Andrew D. Wade et al, MUMAB: ]

These kinds of comparisons provide a method to test the accuracy of our evaluation of mummies. Because many of the secrets of the ancient Egyptian embalmers are, as has been said, lost in the sands of time.

—Cynthia Graber