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A museum in Lima has 2,000 mummy bundles and they've only opened about 12 of them
I was reading a writeup last week about the Pachacamac site outside Lima and one line stopped me cold. The museum there holds roughly 2,000 wrapped mummy bundles, but only about a dozen have ever been unwrapped because the textiles on the outside are worth more to researchers than whatever is inside. One archaeologist quoted in the piece said opening a bundle destroys the wrapping forever, so they mostly scan them instead. That flipped my whole idea of what a dig even looks like, since I always pictured things coming out of the ground and straight into a lab. Does anyone know how common that approach is at other sites? I'm curious if this is a newer trend or something they've been doing for a while.
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angela431d ago
Oh wow, that really makes you stop and think. I ran into something like this when I was helping sort a small collection at a local historical society years ago, and the curator told me they had boxes of garments nobody would ever unfold because the creases alone told a story. The thinking was that once you cut or open something, that info is gone for good, so you save it for when the tools get better. From what I understand this has been going on for decades, not just a new thing, since CT scans and X-rays let them peek inside without touching the cloth. It does change how you picture a dig, that's for sure, more like a library where you leave most of the books closed.
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