More information about Iranian Salt Mummies

"Eight perfectly preserved mummies, believed to be some 4,500 year old, were found by workers engaged in a restoration project in Chile's far north, Spain's EFE news agency reported on Saturday quoting media report. "These mummies date back to between 2,000 BC and 5,000 BC." archaeologist Calogero Santoro told the daily El Mercurio. The mummies are remains of individuals belonging to the Chinchorro culture, which was one of the first to practice mummification and the perfect condition in which the mummies were found is indicative of their advanced techniques. Three of the eight skeletons have been kept on the site in the Morro de Arica site for visitors to see while the other five were taken to Tarapaca University in northern Chile, where other mummies found in previous years are preserved. Morro de Arica is known for its mummies. Several hundred of them, some as old as 7,000 years, were discovered in 1983 in the area. In 2005, University of Tarapaca archaeologists found 50 Chinchorro mummies, dating back to 4,000 B.C., during the demolition of a house. The unusually large number of mummies found in the sector indicate that one of the oldest Chinchorro cemeteries may have been located there. The Chinchorros are presumed to have died out or migrated in the first century AD...."

"An exceptionally well-preserved mummy found in a bog is now on display at the National Museum in Copenhagen. It is the highlight of the museum's reopened permanent exhibition about Danish prehistory. The exhibition also includes a large amount of unique archaeological finds. The "bog mummy" was discovered in northern Denmark in 1879 and has never been exhibited before. The mummy, known as Huldremose woman, was a young woman who was killed as a sacrifice to the gods, approximately in the year 100. Flemming Kaul, Curator at National Museum of Denmark, said, "We can see how she died, or rather how she was killed, because the cord that holds her head was also wrapped several times around her neck. So probably the Huldremose Woman was strangled before she was placed in the bog." The exhibition offers an insight into the period from the first Ice Age hunters to the Viking campaigns...."

"More than 150 years after the disappearance of the Erebus and Terror - the famously ill-fated ships of the lost Franklin Expedition - fresh clues have emerged that could help solve Canadian history's most enduring mystery. A Montreal writer set to publish a book on Inuit oral chronicles from the era of Arctic exploration says she's gathered a "hitherto unreported" account of a British ship wintering in 1850 in the Royal Geographical Society Islands - a significant distance west of the search targets of several 19th- and 20th-century expeditions that have probed the southern Arctic Ocean for Canada's most sought-after shipwrecks. Dorothy Harley Eber, author of the forthcoming Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers, says the new details about Sir John Franklin's disastrous Arctic voyage in the late 1840s emerged from interviews she conducted with several Inuit elders at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. The Inuit account - passed down from 19th-century ancestors who witnessed the British expedition's failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage - describes "an exploring vessel" that anchored off the Royal Geographical Society Islands during the winter of 1850 because "they were iced-in and had no choice." Evidence of the expedition's presence on the islands, according to Inuit oral history captured by Eber, can still be seen during the summer months in greasy deposits along the shore where "the ground is soiled by rendered seal oil blubber" used by stranded crewmen to fuel fires for cooking and warmth...."

More information about the Franklin expedition

"To some, it's the most unusual (and macabre) piece of sports memorabilia around. To others, it's a beacon for all underdogs. But to 19th-century Irish boxing legend Dan Donnelly, the mummified body part now on display at Boston College was just his right arm. Set in a glass case, Donnelly's limb is part of "Fighting Irishmen: Celebrating Celtic Prizefighters 1820 to Present," at BC's Burns Library until September. But this odd relic, and how it wound up in a rare books library, aren't the only bits of history making this show fascinating. Wander among the display cases and you don't have to be a boxing fan or Irish to become engrossed in the larger human story the exhibition tells. At its core, "Fighting Irishmen" is about heroes and hope and pulling yourself up by your own boxing bootstraps.... "Dan Donnelly...became a national hero in Ireland. . . . When he died, 70,000 people attended his funeral. But this was also a time when graves were being robbed and corpses sold to physicians." Donnelly's body was no exception. When it was discovered missing after his death in 1820, a massive search turned it up at the office of a doctor who agreed to relinquish most of the body. He kept the right arm. Mummified, the arm later surfaced at a Scottish medical school, then in a traveling circus, and eventually spent 50 years on display at the Hideout Pub in County Kildare...." 

"An autopsy on the body of an ancient Scythian cavalier found in the Altai Mountains shows he had a degenerative bone disease for several years before he died, German scientists said Friday. The 2006 find of the preserved body and the man's rich possessions on the Mongolian side of the mountains was a scientific sensation. The Scythians were a nation of horsemen in central Asia. The man, who died about 2,300 years ago at the age of 50 or 60, would have been incapable of any demanding physical work for several years before his death, Michael Schultz, a palaeopathologist or scientist who studies diseases in ancient remains. Schultz said the cause of the "bone-decaying process" was unclear and an explanation would not be suggested until the end of this year. The 1.67-metre man would have belonged to the upper middle class of his society. The condition of his teeth showed he mainly ate meat. "The teeth were barely worn. That's typical for nomads," said Schultz. The man's upper body was poorly preserved, only allowing the team of scientists to study a few ribs and vertebrae. The study established the man had serious arthritis in the hands and hips and had chronic inflammation of the sinuses. At some point in his life, he had also broken his arm in a fall and suffered a middle-ear infection. The remains of two horses, a fur coat and weapons were among the possessions which were found in the mound and are under conservation treatment in Novosibirsk, Russia, said Hermann Parzinger, the lead archaeologist on the excavation. The burial chamber inside the manmade mound had very dry air, thanks to a lump of permanent ice beneath a wooden "floor". Parzinger said the remains had been more or less "freeze-dried" because of this...."

"Kim Coelho’s students found themselves on the hunt for mummies Friday, the last day of school. They were only Cornish game hens, but they had been treated like royalty. Friday was nearly six months after the sixth-grade history class treated three — then edible — Cornish game hens with the preservation and burial techniques used for Egyptian pharaohs. To finish the experiment, the students dug up the fowl buried in the Draper Middle School courtyard. Amazingly, the birds didn’t look much different from how they were when the class first interred them. Once unwrapped, the birds appeared free of decay, though they had grown a bit darker and smelled distinctly of the spices the students had bathed them in. “This is why the Egyptians did this, to preserve the bodies,” Coelho reminded her students. Students spent parts of two months preparing the birds in the same manner Egyptians did more than four millennia ago. Coelho introduced the hands-on approach toward the subject to attract her class to a subject matter she previously taught from a textbook. The class used a mixture of salt and baking soda to draw moisture from the birds and help limit any pungent aroma. They also bathed the birds in oil and spices...."

"In Ancient Egypt- the mummification process was a technical and sacred ritual- done to preserve the body --but in Franklin County- apparently someone accidentally did the same thing - without trying. "My dad was in the crawlspace of my brother's house here and he was doing some electrical work and found it underneath in the crawlspace," Sara Supancic said. It used to be Jasper- a Yorkshire terrier- that went missing in 1976. Now its a mummy. So how did Jasper go from a dog to a mummified mutt. "Because in the crawlspace its a cool dry area and there's no bacteria, no fungus, no bugs or anything to help decompose it, so basically it just kind of dried up and preserved how it is," Supancic said. upancic's brother checked the neighborhood and found out the former owners live next door. Obviously, they didn't want Jasper back, so Supancic had another idea. "I'm going to take it back to my classroom- show it to my students- have it on display cause its a one of a kind find." find in really good condition - considering- "I think, especially in Southern Illinois, where its so humid and we have so many bugs and everything that its just conditions had to be exactly right for this to happen and that's really unusual." Besides the dog's size. - it's smell makes it even more surprising. " It feels like paper mache- or it feels like a wasps nest- its just kind of dry papery- little bit harder than paper maybe. It sounds kind hollow," Supancic said."

"New Zealand officials and Maori cultural representatives will visit museums in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia next week to reclaim bones, heads and other human remains collected as anthropological "curiosities". The return will start on Monday at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, where curators will hand over a Maori skull and jawbone taken from New Zealand in 1914 by Edward Ernest Prince, then Canada's top fisheries official, during a research trip, the Calgary Herald reported today. Mr Prince donated the items to the museum before his death in 1936.... Many museums around the world have begun returning human remains to their countries and communities of origin. Bones, hair and ceremonial "grave goods" - religious artifacts sometimes buried with ancient aboriginals - were routinely collected from prehistoric cemeteries by 19th and early 20th-century scholars.... "

"A British scientist said a prehistoric mummy known as the Iceman may have been killed by an asteroid. Mark Hempsell, a space technology professor at Bristol University, said writings on an Assyrian tablet discovered in northern Iraq in the 19th century provide evidence of an asteroid landing in Austria around 3000 B.C., the Italian news service ANSA reported Wednesday. "Given the geographical vicinity and the period of history, it seems feasible that the asteroid's landing on Earth and the Iceman's death could be connected," Hempsell said at a conference in Italy. He said the asteroid landing could also explain a second theory, that the Iceman may have been a ritual sacrifice to appease the forces who sent the asteroid. The Iceman, also known as Oetzi, was found in a glacier in the Oetz mountain valley, ANSA said...."

"Egypt plans to conduct a DNA test on a 3,500-year-old mummy to determine if it is King Thutmose I, one of the most important pharaohs, the country's chief archaeologist said Thursday. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief, said the DNA test and an X-ray will be carried out on a mummy found at the site of ancient Thebes on the west bank of the Nile, what is today Luxor's Valley of the Kings, the Middle East News Agency reported. Hawass said a mummy on display in the Egyptian Museum that was purported for many years to be Thutmose I was not actually the ancient ruler's remains. Thutmose I was the third pharaoh of Egypt's 18th dynasty of pharaohs. His reign is generally dated from 1506 to 1493 B.C. He was succeeded by his son Thutmose II, who in turn was succeeded by Thutmose II's sister, Hatshepsut, ancient Egypt's most powerful female pharaoh. Egypt has acquired a $5 million DNA lab, funded by the Discovery Channel, which has become a centerpiece of an ambitious plan to identify mummies and re-examine the royal mummy collection. The best way to obtain accurate results is from the DNA found in a cell's nucleus because it contains information from both parents. But mummy DNA is usually so deteriorated that the chances of finding usable nuclear DNA are slim. Hawas did not say what the mummy's DNA will be compared to in the attempt to identify it. Last year, Egypt started a DNA test on a female mummy to determine whether it is Queen Hatshepsut. The results were never made public. There is some secrecy surrounding Egypt's DNA testing of mummies...."