Recently, during an audit, we identified a small collection of Egyptian mummified remains.
We were particularly interested in them from a conservation point of view.
We collaborated with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, who
conducted CT scanning of the mummified head.
"So this non-invasive technique allowed us to look
through all the layers of the specimen.
We were able to identify that, again, that the specimen was actually in really good condition."
Beyond the conservation value of the scans, there was also a great forensic
research opportunity and potential to develop innovative teaching resources.
We believe the head is over 2,000 years old.
CT scanning is a fantastic method of
looking inside the wrappings of a mummy. We've been CT scanning mummies since the
1990s and as the technology with CT scans improves we get more
information; we can look at the density of bones, the thickness of bones, we can
go inside the body. And with this head,
we've got an excellent example of mummification. We can't see any injuries,
but we can see that the young woman had severe abcesses around her teeth and
gums and so-forth, and this would have caused her quite a lot of pain, and
possibly may have impacted on her health as well. With our multidisciplinary
team, we are discovering more and more about this young woman, and in this case
this head has artificial eyes, so that's not uncommon for an ancient
Egyptian mummies, where the ancient embalmers attempted to make the person
look as much
as they were in life as they are in death.
So my involvement in this project
was essentially to analyse the data of the CT scan files from the Victorian Institute of
Forensic Medicine, and create a 3d model. The CT scanner will pick up a lot more
than just the the skull itself. That model was pretty much split in half and
then built in two sections, and that was about a hundred and forty hours of
printing all up.
There's a lot to consider with the actual model itself and how the mesh
is constructed. Is it watertight, or is there any particular
faults that may stop that file from printing, and when you are doing
something like a hundred and forty hour print, you don't want that to fail
eighty percent of the way through, you want to make sure that's going to work properly.
As a sculptor I'm taking the techniques of forensic facial reconstruction and
applying them to the skull of the mummy. Forensic facial reconstruction is a
technique which combines art and science and it's used to identify remains.
The reconstruction process involves tissue depth markers. Tissue depth markers are
measurements taken at specific points across the face and are based on a
specific population and in this case we use data taken from modern-day Egyptians.
The next step is to lay the clay across the skull in accordance with major
muscles of the face and the combination of those two factors means that the end
result is always informed by the skull.
For us here it's been an amazing experience,
bringing this ancient Egyptian back to life, and i hope I've done her justice.