Field Museum unlocks ancient secrets with high-tech scans of mummy collection
CHICAGO - "Mummy" is the word at the Field Museum this Halloween, which is using some new technology to unlock the secrets of the dead.
On Tuesday, researchers at the Field showed off the results of a big project to CT scan most of their mummy collection. They’re getting a fresh new look at some very old bodies.
For decades, the Field Museum mummy collection has captivated—and sometimes terrified—millions of visitors, especially at Halloween.
"Oftentimes we see popular culture mummies as very spooky, scary, in tattered toilet paper-like wrappings," said Stacy Drake, a collections manager at the Field Museum. "But our goal here is to be able to look inside the wrappings and inside the coffins."
So last month, the Field began virtually unwrapping 23 of its mummies using a CT scanner that looks at more than just bones.
"What CT scanning gives you is a complete view of the individual in three dimensions, from the exterior all the way through the interior," said Field senior conservator JP Brown.
Amazingly, the Field's mummies have never been CT scanned before. That's mostly because they’re extremely fragile and sometimes quite large, which makes it difficult to get them to hospitals where most CT scanners are located.
"So if the mummies can't go to the scanner, what we can do is bring the scanner to the mummies," said Brown.
That’s what they did in September, bringing a CT scanner inside a truck to the parking lot outside the Field.
The results so far are amazing, showing soft tissue details never seen before and helping the Field learn about who they have—rather than what they have.
"These are people. They lived lives. Had names," said Drake. "And we are using these scans to learn more about these individuals and the experiences they may have had."
For instance, they discovered that the mummy named Harwa lived a cushy life as a doorkeeper, with no signs of physical labor. And the mummified lady Chenet-aa had artificial painted eyes placed in her eye sockets so she could continue to see in the afterlife.
The youngest mummy scanned is 2,200 years old, and the oldest lived 5,500 years ago.
The curators say with all this new data they’ll soon be able to give visitors a much clearer picture of who these people were, how they lived, and how they died.
"With this information, we're going to be able to tell visitors a lot more about who these people were as individuals, which I think is going to be super interesting," said Brown.