NCSA Collaborates to Showcase Mummy Visualizations

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.

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.)

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.