Monday, November 02, 2009

In the Lab

Unravelling two tales of two mummies
pal-item.com
Rachel E. Sheeley

On a day when children costumed as mummies go trick-or-treating, it's appropriate that new information has been acquired and new conservation efforts made for the only two Egyptian Indiana museum-owned mummies.

Both are in Richmond.

On Sunday, Wayne County Historical Museum volunteer Bonnie Sampsell, guest curator of the museum's Egyptian collection, will share the results of carbon dating on four samples from the mummy there.

Also on Sunday, area residents can tour the Joseph Moore Museum of Natural History at Earlham College to see how recent conservation efforts on the mummy and its coffin there have improved its look and added information about it.
Wayne County Historical Museum

For the past several years, efforts to research the mummy and improve the Egyptian collection have been spearheaded by Sampsell, a former Richmond resident now living in North Carolina.

She has been doing research in Egyptology and geology and traveling to Egypt for many years. She has been published in a number of Egyptology-related publications and made presentations at the Egypt Exploration Society in Cairo, Egypt.

This past year, forensic artist Brenda Robertson Stewart reconstructed the mummy's face using its skull as a basis and several forensic anthropologists examined the mummy's bones. They also removed samples for carbon dating.

4-page story, with two photographs and a video of the virtual reconstruction of one of the mummy's faces by a forensic artist.

No comments: