The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead

Pringle, Heather

ISBN 10: 0786865512 / ISBN 13: 9780786865512

Published by Hyperion Books, USA, 2001

About this Item

APPEARS NEW AND UNREAD! Hardcover 1st edition. Heather Pringle is a Canadian freelance science writer specializing in archaeology and the deep past. She came to writing after working as a museum researcher and book editor, and her journalism has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, Discover, Science, New Scientist, and Archaeology, among others. Her honours include the Kavli Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Canadian National Magazine Award, and a Fellowship in the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She is emeritus editor at Hakai Magazine and has published five non-fiction books. Her most recent, The Northwomen: Stories from the Other Half of the Viking World, came out in 2024. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia. The Mummy Congress was published by Hyperion in 2001 and began as an assignment: Pringle was sent to northern Chile to cover the World Congress on Mummy Studies, a gathering that convenes every three years and draws specialists from around the globe. She found herself in the middle of what she described as the most passionate professional gathering of her working life, with researchers crowded into a seaside hotel arguing fiercely over the significance of their discoveries. She left thoroughly caught up in the subject and spent the following year travelling the world to visit the leading figures in the field firsthand. The book is structured around both the science and the scientists themselves. One of its distinctive qualities is the attention it pays to the human dimension of a field that might otherwise seem purely clinical or macabre. The mummy researchers Pringle encounters emerge as passionate, sometimes eccentric individuals, and she treats their obsessions with both curiosity and affection. The geographical and historical range is considerable. The book moves from the ancient Chinchorro mummies of Chile ? among the oldest deliberately preserved human remains in the world ? to bog bodies found in the Netherlands still showing signs of violent deaths. It visits medieval saints on display in Italian cathedrals, frozen Inca sacrificial victims recovered from Andean peaks, and mummies unearthed in China that have confounded assumptions about ancient population movements. It traces the embalming techniques of ancient Egypt, considers the self-mummification practices of certain Japanese Buddhist monks, and recounts the nineteenth-century fashion for public mummy unwrappings in New Orleans. The Soviet effort to preserve Stalin's body also makes an appearance, as does the emergence of commercial mummification services in the modern era. Running through the book is a broader argument: that humanity's relationship with its preserved dead is itself a culturally revealing phenomenon. Mummies have been venerated as saints, ground into pigments used by painters, fought over by governments, and investigated for evidence of ancient disease, diet, climate, and trade. The science brought to bear on them ? forensic analysis, isotope studies, DNA extraction, imaging technology ? has rapidly expanded what can be learned from a body thousands of years old. Pringle also allows the subject to turn inward, toward what our persistent fascination with preserved remains tells us about our own fears of death and longings for continuity. Critical reception was strongly positive. The New York Times Book Review praised the writing for its clarity and intensity. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, describing it as a delightfully macabre piece of mortuary globe-trotting. Booklist, also with a starred review, found it more entertaining and informative than any fictional treatment of the same territory. The Washington Post called it delightfully unpleasant ? a phrase that captures rather well the particular pleasure the book offers its readers.

Seller Inventory # 1013810

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead
• Publisher: Hyperion Books, USA
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786865512
• ISBN 13: 9780786865512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • .Social Sciences - Sociology
  • .History - Ancient History

About this title

Synopsis

A study of the mysteries of mummies explores the world of the scientists who devote their own lives to the study of them and examines how mummies have been used, venerated, worshiped, collected, and studied over the course of nearly seven thousand years.

Review

You do not have to be a necrophiliac to enjoy this book, and the congress in question is not on the wrong side of the moral track, but The Mummy Congress was inspired by a kind of academic love-in for amateurs of preserved bodies. Heather Pringle, a science writer who lives in Vancouver, Canada, was inspired to write this fascinating book by attending the Third World Congress on Mummy Studies held in the Chilean town of Arica at the edge of the Atacama desert. She returned, as she says "almost feverish with excitement over the wonderful stories I'd heard there". The Mummy Congress recounts many of these extraordinary stories of the discovery of mummified bodies and the people who have spent their professional lives trying to recover as much information as they can about them. There are some great crime stories here such as that of the 2400-year-old Tollund man of Denmark and the other bog bodies of Europe, many of whom might have been human sacrifices. Our concern for the dead and for elaborate burial ceremonies date back at least 30,000 years. Over the millennia humans around the world have discovered that burial in peatbogs, deserts and ice can preserve some soft tissue--especially the skin and hair, even muscle and brains--almost indefinitely. But since there are few places in the world where such conditions persist, peoples since the Chinchorros of Chile and the ancient Egyptians have spent a lot of effort trying to replicate such processes of mummification and invent even better artificial ones. The scientific investigation of mummified bodies might not be for the fainthearted and is today very sophisticated, but according to Heather Pringle, those that pursue the cause "are unquestionably heroic... they debate earnestly... the ethics of putting the ancient dead on display... (and) ...never talk lightly or unfeelingly about their ailments... they show us that even the greatest kings and holiest of saints... once suffered the common toll of humanity-disease, injury and pain". The Mummy Congress is a great read and I suspect lots of friends and family will be subjected to many a "listen to this" or "would you believe" quote. There are 16 pages of illustrations including some spooky colour photos along with an index and bibliography and, by the way, the next Mummy Congress is to be held in Greenland. --Douglas Palmer