A young child who died more than 2,000 years ago in Egypt is creating quite a stir these days in a state-of-the-art conservation lab at Winterthur Museum near Wilmington, Del.

In what could be a case straight out of Unsolved Mysteries, students in the Winterthur/UD art conservation program are wondering who this child was, as they analyze her mummified remains, wrappings and coffin. The graduate students, who specialize in objects conservation, are working on a unique object. In ancient Egypt, mummification was usually reserved for wealthy adults, so it is rare to find the mummy of a child.

But, the students have all the latest technological advances at their disposal as they seek to unravel this mystery. In a unique meeting of antiquity and technology, they even ordered a CAT scan for the mummy, in order to get a three-dimensional view.

The mummy belongs to Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., where an alumnus donated it in 1860. Over the years, the mummy and coffin began to deteriorate.

Holy Cross officials called in Rika Smith McNally, AS'87M, a graduate of UD's Winterthur Program, who now works as an independent objects and sculpture conservator in Framingham, Mass. After she and a research associate from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts examined the mummy, McNally contacted the Winterthur/UD Program about possible conservation efforts.

Conservation costs were estimated at $30,000, but faculty in the Winterthur conservation program agreed to donate time and effort to give students the opportunity to work on something so rare.

The mummy arrived at Winterthur in spring 2000, and during the 2000-01 academic year, four students studied the mummy, its wrappings, the coffin and its painted decoration. After those students moved on through the conservation program, a new group continued to work on the mummy and coffin, beginning this fall.

"This first year was devoted to analysis and study," Margaret Little, AS'88M, adjunct assistant professor of art conservation, who is overseeing the project, says. "This year, a new group of students is looking at treatment options and will carry them out. The project combines so many different materials, and there is so much to learn from studying the piece, that it is a perfect conservation project."

Tonja King, a native of California, who obtained her undergraduate degree in art history at the University of Arizona, spent last year researching the bead netting draped over the body. Her conclusions were that the beads may be original, but the cords on which they are strung are not.

"Beads this old would usually [have come loose from the cords and] be scattered throughout the coffin," she says. "Because they are intact, we can only guess that someone has restrung them."

"In the past," Little says, "conservators may not have recorded conservation efforts. We have no documentation of the work done on this object, for instance. Now, any work carried out on this object will be documented; however, when working with antiquities, you're facing a lot of mystery. In addition to wanting to know how this object was restored, we are interested in knowing how it was made."

Adam Jenkins, an arts management graduate of Keene State College in his native New Hampshire, studied the paint and binding medium on the coffin.

"We analyzed what the paint and media are and then compared the results to what we understand of ancient Egyptian manufacturing techniques," he says. "Our conclusions are that the materials are pretty brittle and that the paint pigments are extremely light-sensitive. Analyzing the colors also can help us date the materials--we know that Egyptian blue is found on painted artifacts of this age, but at the foot of the coffin is a blue that is more aquamarine in color and different in composition. This may indicate that the original paint was reinforced somewhere along the line."

Analysis of the textiles used to wrap the mummy was left to Alisa Vignalo of St. Paul, Minn., who has an undergraduate degree in art conservation from the College of St. Catherine.

"The mummy is interesting because its limbs are wrapped separately," she says. "Usually, only one piece of material was used to bind the body from head to foot. The linen used is appropriate for the mummy's date, because there was no cotton well into the first century. It's not the finest Egyptian linen, but, given that this is a child and the mummification process was so expensive, that's to be expected."

Hugh Shockey of San Diego, who has an arts and business studies degree from Rhodes College in Tennessee, was in charge of the imaging of the actual remains.

"We X-rayed the coffin and mummy, and that gave us some information. Having a CAT scan done gave us a much more complete, three-dimensional picture. From it, we are able to determine that this is most likely a preadolescent child. There is no development of the hip structure or the hands, and it has unerupted molars still in its jaw, indicating that it was a child who had not yet begun to lose her baby teeth."

A lot of thought went into ordering the X-rays and CAT scan, Little says, adding, "These are nondestructive, analytical techniques. We have to carefully balance the amount of information we will acquire from a procedure against the potential destructiveness of the technique. Also, we strive to treat the object with the respect due the remains of a child."

"All of the analysis has uncovered information that is useful to us and has enabled us to look further at the literature to determine the type of treatment that will be done to stabilize the piece," King says. "Our goal is to halt deterioration and move toward restoration that will last for the next 100 years."

Now that new students have joined the program and will carry out whatever restoration techniques are decided upon, the original four who worked on the project have moved on to internships traditionally associated with the art conservation program. Jenkins is at the Liverpool Conservation Center, and King is working at the Singapore Heritage Conservation Center.

Vignalo and Shockey are at the West Virginia National Park Service at Harpers Ferry, where Vignalo works on furniture conservation and Shockey restores leather screens.

And, while they were not exactly sad to say goodbye to the mummy, all say the experience of working on it was valuable.

"It really exposed us to the breadth of the field. Everything we learned here we'll be able to use again," Jenkins says.

--Beth Thomas