"Peruvian government archaeologists have found an Incan mummy and 25 ceremonial objects in a dig within the Machu Picchu state park. Lead archaeologist Homar Gallegos says the sex and age of the ancient Inca is still unknown. The team plans to analyze the mummy's remains and the ceremonial objects in a laboratory in the nearby city of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire. Gallegos says the tomb held gold brooches, ceramic plates and ceramic vessels decorated in pairs as man and woman, representing the concept of Andean duality. Gallegos said Friday that the mummy was found some (12 miles) 20 kilometers from the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu at a site called Torontoy, which functioned as a trade post...."

"When the Ulster Museum closed in 2006 for refurbishment 800,000 objects had to be packed away for storage. One of the exhibits exerts more of a pull than the others - Takabuti, the mummified remains of the daughter of an ancient Egyptian priest. She died about 660BC and was interred in the city of Thebes, but in 1834 she was brought to Belfast by Thomas Greg of Holywood, County Down. Aged 30, the son of a wealthy father had been to Egypt and purchased the mummy, which he presented to the Belfast Natural History Society, the forerunners of the Ulster Museum. The first mummy to be brought to Ireland, she was unwrapped in front of learned men of the day in a blaze of publicity with newspaper reports commenting on the event. She became the biggest draw at the fledgling Belfast Museum, and could still be billed as the city's oldest tourist attraction with generations of children still being brought on school trips and by parents to see the mummy. Winifred Glover, the museum's curator of world cultures, said that when the museum re-opens next Autumn she will be returning to the Egyptian gallery, but with an added feature. A sculpture has been made of her face, as it would have been when she was alive, to go on display with her...."

More on the Kabayan mummies

"When Hetep-Bastet died at the age of 65, she had an abscessed tooth that would no doubt have exacerbated the pain she endured following a broken hip two months earlier. The northern Egyptian woman's otherwise peaceful afterlife -- 2,500 years of it so far, and counting -- took a violent turn in 1969, though, when the coffin holding her mummified remains was damaged in a Quiet Revolution protest by students at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Montréal (now part of l'Université du Québec à Montréal), which had received it as a gift in 1927 from the Cairo Museum in Egypt. Today, after nearly 40 years in storage, Hetep-Bastet's coffin is almost completely repaired and preserved, and will be part of an exhibition of Egyptian antiquities next month at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Tombs of Eternity: The Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (Dec. 19 to Aug. 16) will display more than 200 artifacts, including weapons, jewelry, sculptures, amulets, furniture, sarcophagi and human and animal mummies, each illuminating aspects of the ancient Egyptian belief in the afterlife. There will also be lectures and demonstrations, and screenings of the IMAX film Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs, about the discovery in the late 1800s of 12 mummified Egyptian kings. "We're using material their culture associated with Egyptian burial ritual and funerary rites as a window to look at life and death and faith in ancient Egypt," says exhibition curator Matthew Betts, adding that many of the artifacts are from an exhibit from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston...."

"Iran has banned mining at the home of its world renowned salt mummies in a bid to protect the historical area northwest of the country. The Ministry of Industries and Mines has cancelled the mining permit for the Chehrabad Salt Mine; industrial authorities have also informed the mine owners that any actions on their behalf are as of now prohibited in the area. The area will become a scientific and archeological research center. The Chehrabad Salt Mine is located in the Hamzehlou region of Zanjan province in northwestern Iran. The salt men, also known as Iranian salt mummies, were accidentally discovered by miners in 1993. Three of the salt men date back to the Parthian (247 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanid (224-651 CE) eras, while all other human remains discovered at the site go back to the Achaemenid Dynasty (550-330 BCE). Historical relics have been discovered alongside the skeletons, including leather shoes, a leather bag, a terracotta lamp and two cow horns, most of which remain intact. Salt at the mine worked to preserve the artifacts, as well as internal organs of the salt men themselves such as the stomach and colon. Fingernails and hair have also been found undamaged, which will enable scientific testing to be carried out that could reveal further clues about these ancient people...."

More on the Salt Mummies

"On a scorching hot day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of the 40 kings and queens found a few years earlier in an astonishing hidden cache near the Valley of the Kings. The 1881 discovery of the tombs, in the Deir El Bahri valley, 300 miles south of Cairo, had been astonishing and plentiful. Hidden from the world for centuries were some of the great Egyptian pharaohs - Rameses the Great, Seti I and Tuthmosis III. Yet this body, buried alongside them, was different, entombed inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased's identity. It was an unexpected puzzle and, once the coffin was opened, Maspero found himself even more shocked. There, wrapped in a sheep or goatskin - a ritually unclean object for ancient Egyptians - lay the body of a young man, his face locked in an eternal blood-curdling scream. It was a spine-tingling sight, and one that posed even more troubling questions: here was a mummy, carefully preserved, yet caught in the moment of death in apparently excruciating pain. He had been buried in exalted company, yet been left without an inscription, ensuring he would be consigned to eternal damnation, as the ancient Egyptians believed identity was the key to entering the afterlife. Moreover, his hands and feet had been so tightly bound that marks still remained on the bones. Who could he be, this screaming man, assigned the anonymous label 'Man E' in the absence of a proper name? ...Today, nearly 130 years after his body was first uncovered, a team of scientists has brought the wonders of modern forensic techniques to bear on the enigma. Using sophisticated-technology, including CT scanning, Xrays and facial reconstruction, to examine the mummy, they uncovered tantalizing new clues that could reveal his identity, all under the watchful eye of Five's TV crew, who are making a series of documentaries hoping to unravel some of Egypt's great secrets. Their findings suggest that Man E is indeed Prince Pentewere, elder son of Rameses III, who, with his mother, Tiy, had evolved a plan to assassinate the pharaoh and ascend to the throne...."

"Scientists in Japan have refined a cloning technique that has enabled researchers to clone apparently healthy mice from the frozen corpse of a mouse that had been kept in a freezer for 16 years at a temperature of -20C. They employed the same techniques that scientists used to create Dolly the sheep, but added an extra stage where they effectively repeated part of the cloning process, which enabled them to successfully produce cloned offspring. The scientists believe the study shows that it might be possible in the future to use the same techniques to clone creatures from the frozen tissue of animals found buried in permafrost regions, for example, the frozen corpses of mammoths...."

"An important lesson in tissue conservation chemistry emerged from the death of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, one of Britain's most revered military heroes. Nelson was fatally shot at sea on Oct. 21, 1805, while leading the Royal Navy to a decisive triumph in the Battle of Trafalgar during the Napoleonic Wars. Suspecting that a state funeral would be in order for the adored commander, William Beatty, the surgeon aboard Nelson's vessel, the H.M.S. Victory, opted to preserve Nelson's remains for the trip back to England instead of conducting the customary burial at sea. Beatty later published the book "The Death of Lord Nelson," an account of the event that explained his procedure and his observations in detail. By the early 1800s, preservation in liquor was a well-recognized practice, so Beatty decided to place Nelson's remains in a large cask filled with brandy. The cask was lashed to the deck and placed under guard. Throughout the voyage to England, Beatty refreshed the brandy because the corpse absorbed a significant quantity of fluid. He sometimes used defined ratios of brandy and "spirit of wine," a distilled ethanol, which he obtained at port in Gibraltar. Once back home, the British press roundly criticized Beatty for failing to preserve Nelson in rum, which at the time was believed to be superior to brandy as a preservative, says John E. Simmons, an independent museum consultant. "The reason everyone thought rum was a better preservative was because it was commonly used, but rum was commonly used because it was cheap," Simmons explains. Beatty defended his actions in "The Death of Lord Nelson" and laid out the chemical principle underpinning good preservation—ethanol concentration...."

"Heavily guarded in a north Liverpool ware-house, within a special container power-sealed with a dozen rivets, there lies a treasure greater than either of its counterparts from Tutan-khamen’s tomb. The battle girdle worn by the last of Egypt’s great battling pharaohs, Rameses III, is delicately coiled on a bed of layered tissues: a 3,000-year- old gem as priceless as our own crown jewels. The five-metre exquisitely embroidered multi-coloured linen belt will form the centrepiece of Liverpool World Museum’s new Egyptian gallery. The girdle would have been donned by Rameses as he proudly rode his war chariot on campaigns against invaders. It is an item, held in Liverpool since the 1860s, but known to scholars the world over.... Ashley Cooke, World Museum’s curator of Egyptology and research fellow at Liverpool University, is in no doubt about the uniqueness of this particular artefact: “It is one of the most treasured items in the world. Only two similar such items exist. They are from the tomb of Tutankhamen, but they are not as splendid or as long.” The belt is among 1,500 items that go on display from December 5. Among the others likely to vie for attention are five mummies, including one of a female contemporary of Cleopatra, who inspired a classic novel from the celebrated Victorian writer Henry Rider Haggard.... "

"Gemtasu wanted his father to be good as new, or as new as a smoked mummy can be. Gemtasu's father, the former chief Moimango, had been resting for decades on the edge of a cliff overlooking the village of Koke, in Papua New Guinea. The Anga people mummified their elders until missionaries convinced them to adopt more Christian burials. Moimango was the last to have been mummified, one of about a dozen still perched on the hill. When the expedition from the Discovery Channel arrived, Moimango's toes and fingers were slowly being consumed by lichen. A rodent had nibbled a hole in his abdomen, which still contained the man's organs. Moimango's head was hanging by threads of dried muscle and skin, his scalp was peeling away and his head was filled with wasp nests. Ronald Beckett, co-director of the Bioanthropology Research Institute at Quinnipiac University, and Josh Bernstein, host of the Discovery Channel's "Into the Unknown with Josh Bernstein," helped to put the chief back together using natural materials and techniques. They heat-sealed the crack in his skull with an ember, patched holes with bark, using native adhesives from plants. They finally covered him with a new coat of ocher mud...."