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CSUB archaeologist looks for story behind death
| Sunday, Oct 28 2007 9:45 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Oct 29 2007 11:43 AM
Someone or something bashed a guy known as Mummy No. 7 in the back of the head more than 1,500 years ago. Cal State Bakersfield anthropology professor Robert Yohe is trying to figure out the mystery behind his death.
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Yohe holds a cast replica plaque of Isis suckling the child god Horus.
A Christian mummy of unknown gender and its burial items were uncovered this summer by Cal State Bakersfield professor Robert Yohe’s team at the Tell El-Hibeh archaeological project in Egypt. The mummy is dated between 400 and 600 A.D.
Yohe has spent each summer since 2003 studying the archaeological site Tell El-Hibeh in Egypt. This summer, the Discovery Channel took an interest in the project, especially one mummy with an intriguing story.
Yohe returned to Egypt for about two weeks in late September to study Coptic (Christian) mummies from a Roman outpost. The project started in 2000 through UC Berkeley.
Last fall, the company producing the show for Discovery approached Yohe. The host of "The Bone Detective," the title as Yohe knows it, travels the world investigating human remains and the stories behind them. A Cairo university professor had recommended the UC Berkeley project to the company and a crew filmed at the site this summer.
Yohe said the show, a 13-part series, will devote an hourlong episode on the project. The show will air in late winter or early spring.
The team wants to know how the mummified man died. A sling bullet? A club to the head? The oval-shaped wound might hold clues, Yohe said.
Researchers knew the body was male "because preservation is really good," he said, laughing.
"(The film crew members) were pretty fascinated about that and they even filmed his anatomical correctness," he said.
The town is in the middle of the country, 100 miles south of Cairo on the Nile River, Yohe said.
The project area is about 2 square miles, Yohe said. A tell is a town mound with layers of ruins from centuries past. Tell El-Hibeh was established about 3,000 years ago.
Scientists discovered Mummy No. 7 in 2004 in a pit uncovered by looters on the project's northside. He lived between the fourth and sixth centuries, Yohe said.
The team opened his wrappings in 2005 and discovered the wound. A heart surgeon looked inside the body with an endoscope this summer.
Mummy No. 7 was "cut down in the prime of his life," between the ages of 20 and 30, possibly 25, Yohe said.
Many remains discovered at the site have been of adults in their 30s or 40s.
There may have been a violent conflict in this town during the period, but it's too early to tell, Yohe said.
The mummified man probably wasn't rich. His teeth were in excellent shape, considering the poor hygiene of the time.
Yohe said the heart surgeon on the team discovered large carbon deposits on the mummy's lungs, probably from smoke buildup from sitting near cooking fires.
The mummy was buried with 30 pounds of salt, which shows a transition in mummification techniques, Yohe said. While early mummification methods were slow, Christianized Romans wanted bodies buried quickly.
But the old ways didn't fade and townspeople began to preserve bodies in salt, Yohe said.
The team also uncovered three infant or child burials this summer, Yohe said.
CSUB graduate student Deanna Heikkinen has worked with Yohe on the project.
She graduated from CSUB in June with her master's degree in anthropology and will finish her master's in history next year.
Her specialty is textiles. By analyzing cloth, she can determine the time period in which a mummy lived.
Mummy No. 7 would have had plenty to eat, she said, including fish and water fowl from the Nile River and crops from its fertile banks.
The townspeople lived in mud brick houses, and the Roman outpost would have included business and civic areas. Researchers also found ruins of a temple dedicated to a pharaoh or Egyptian god.
Little work has been done on this historical period and region of Egypt, Yohe said. Most archaeological work has focused on the classic sites in Giza and Luxor.
"This particular area is an archaeological no-man's land and so that's what makes it exciting," Yohe said.
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