A Roman period Egyptian mummy (carbon dated at
about 190 BC, plus or
minus 160 years) owned by the UI's World Heritage
Museum, UIUC campus,
has
undergone a series of nondestructive analyses to
determine embalming procedures, age, gender, and
medical history of the
individual inside the wrappings. This
interdisciplinary effort involving almost a dozen
research teams at the Urbana-Champaign and Chicago
campuses--including NCSA's Biological Imaging Group
(BIG)--has been ongoing since 1989, the year the
mummy was donated to the museum.
Research is coordinated by the Program on Ancient Technologies and Archaeological Materials, one of several UIUC co-organizers for the 30th International Symposium on Archaoemetry held on the UIUC campus in May. With the collaboration of the Beckman Visualization Facility and NCSA's BIG, computer visualizations of the UI's mummy were showcased at the UIUC Beckman Institute to some 200 conference delegates from the world's outstanding museum labs.
Clint Potter, team leader of BIG, says that the NCSA group has collaborated in a variety of visualization techniques, including holography and virtual environment visualization. For conference attendees, NCSA Senior Research Programmer Rachael Brady demonstrated visualizations of the mummy dataset using Crumbs, volume visualization software for the CAVE [see access, Fall 1995].
Through the archaeological and analytical efforts of the research teams, it has been established that the mummy is a seven- to nine-year-old child of mixed race belonging to the Greco-Roman aristocracy ruling Egypt in the second century AD. The child's gender and cause of death are still to be determined.
 |
Holographic rendering of the head of the UI's mummy from the Fayum Dynasty. (Computer-generated holography by Michael Dalton, Voxel Inc., obtained from CT dataset.) |
 |
Stills of a 3D animation of the same head cyberscanned from a sculpted reconstruction. (Cyberscanning by the UIUC Beckman Visualization Facility under the direction of Barbara Fossum from forensic reconstruction by Ray Evenhouse, UIC Biomedical Visualization Facility.) |
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