Science & Nature
Less Fright, More Insight: CT Scans of Field Museum’s Ancient Egyptian Mummies Offer New Details and Stories
Video: A CT scan of the Field Museum's Harwa mummy. (Credit: The Field Museum)
It’s less of a trick and more of a treat for Field Museum scientists who have new CT scans of mummified people from the museum’s “Inside Ancient Egypt” exhibit.
“I guess you think about Scooby Doo, or like a person wrapped up in toilet paper that’s rotting and running after you,” said Field Museum Human Remains Collections Manager Stacy Drake of mummies in the popular imagination. “Through the scans, we can see more about some of the things [Harwa] may have experienced as he was alive.”
Drake is referring to one of the 26 mummified individuals that recently went through a CT scanner.
She says the scans that were collected over four days and offer new insights into the Field Museum’s collection of mummies.
“We know from the writings on his coffin that [Harwa] lived a life and had a profession, had a career just like we do today, and that gave him certain access to the treatments that he received after death, his care and his preparation,” she said.
CT scans of Lady Chenet-aa, another mummy in the museum’s collection, revealed that she may have been in her late 30s or early 40s at the time of death, and that she had supplementary eyes placed in her eye sockets to ensure they came with her to her afterlife.
JP Brown analyze composite scans of a mummified individual. (Bella Koscal / The Field Museum)
Drake and her colleague JP Brown, a senior conservator with the Field Museum, said the CT scanning process isn’t unusual; the museum had previously conducted scans of its other mummified individuals years ago and the recent scanning that took place in a truck just outside the Field Museum was to finish out the rest of the collection.
But Brown said they did run into one problem.
“CT scanners are made for people and mummies are interesting shapes,” he said. “So sometimes we can’t get the mummy through the scanner as far as we would like.”
Brown said he and his colleagues will examine the new scans over the next two years.
“What I’m hoping to find out is specific conditions of the mummies so that we can design appropriate storage and treatment regimens for them, to keep them going into the future,” he said.
Drake said she hopes the scans will help the public see the mummified individuals as people instead of artifacts.
“If they continue to be on display, what stories will we share with the public so that they can, again, rehumanize them,” she said.
