Bugs, Bones, and Back Hallways: Week Four: Bodies in the Basement

This week I was lucky enough to be able to take a tour of the museum’s Mummy Vault with some other interns. The museum’s mummy collection is not very big compared to some of the other collections, and is housed in the basement. An interesting place-- rumor has it that at one time they were planning to turn the basement into a parking garage. They assigned each curator a space before construction began, but before they had a chance to turn the area into parking, the curators had all fenced off the spaces allotted to them and began filling them with stuff. Museum curators just love stuff. Not one of them ever throws anything away. It didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone working in the museum that the garage never happened. The spaces still sit, sectioned off by chicken wire and full of stuff.

One section of the basement, however, belongs to the mummies. The first things we looked at were a few cast-iron coffins, a couple for adults and one belonging to an infant, with remains yet to be examined. These coffins, when sealed properly, cause natural mummification by keeping air and moisture out. The ones we saw had been found on construction sites in Philadelphia. Apparently old burials regularly turn up at construction sites, and the remains are often sent to the museum. These coffins were all in an area that looked just about the way one would expect the Smithsonian’s basement to look. They lay just inside a dark and dusty chicken wire enclosure, next to some very old (and very politically incorrect) figurines that had been used in early museum displays.

Within the mummy department’s chicken wire cage, there is a room. This room is sealed off from everything else, and inside is a pristine lab. It is temperature controlled, humidity controlled, and spotless. There were a few mummies laid out in the center of the room near some more coffins, and cases lining the walls.

One of the mummies was the “soap man” from Philadelphia. This fascinating mummy began as a man who was buried in a soil that essentially turned all of the fat on his body to soap. There he is, all of the fatty parts of his body preserved forever, still wearing his stockings.

After looking at a couple of the classic Egyptian mummies that sat out next to the soap man, we turned our attention to the cases on the wall. These cases were not long and narrow and did not look like they could hold what we think of as a typical mummy, lying flat with arms across the chest. Instead, one case had drawers full of mummy parts from the days when scientists at the museum would chop up mummies to examine them. (Now, they use medical scanning equipment to examine remains without damaging them.)

One of the dissected mummies was that of an Egyptian girl who had died at the age of sixteen. She was poor, so her organs had not been removed during the mummification process. In her abdomen, scientists found the skeletal remains of a full-term infant; childbirth appears to have been her cause of death. (In picture above the infant remains can be seen in the white box on the lower right side of the shelf).

In another cabinet there was an amazingly well preserved Peruvian mummy. I found her to be the most alarming of the bunch. The woman is seated, with her legs crossed and her hands clasped together supporting her head, which looks as though it is gently resting upon them for a nap. She still has all of her clothing and some of her hair. Apparently the ancient Peruvians mummified their loved ones and left them in a dry cave for a year. The completely dessicated remains could then be brought out and basically reunited with the family. Essentially, their descendants would sit them by the camp fire to participate with the living in religious ceremonies.

The last things we saw were mummified brains and shrunken heads. They were all fascinating, but the stink that came from those cases was slightly awful. It wasn’t the smell of death, but the smell of whatever had been used to preserve the remains, and it was simply not pleasant.