Preserving and Restoring Human Remains

The Academy of Sciences is organising, in collaboration with the ‘La Venaria Reale’ Conservation and Restoration Centre, a meeting for the conservation recovery of an artifact found at the site of Gebelein (Upper Egypt) dating back to the ancient kingdom and preserved in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin (MAET).

The mummified human body in a huddled position, completely blindfolded and with the face painted on the bandages is among the oldest preserved in the collection of the MAET (Ancient Kingdom, IV Dynasty, 2600-2400 BC) and represents a rarity for the state of conservation of the bandages and the shroud that surround it and for the remains of considerable documentary value arrived from its funeral kit.

The find was restored in 2021 by the ‘La Venaria Reale’ Conservation and Restoration Centre, funded by the Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo Foundation, and then exhibited in the exhibition ‘L’Uomo svelato. Studies and restoration of a 4500-year-old Egyptian mummy’ (Palazzo Mathis, Bra, 9 September-12 December 2021).

The exhibition and the subsequent restoration were an opportunity to return a fascinating journey of historical and biological knowledge of the find and, not least, the collective thinking behind the protocol that guided the restoration intervention: restorers, archaeologists, anthropologists, doctors and diagnosticians worked in synergy developing a critical approach that paid particular attention to ethical issues related to the handling, conservation and exposure of human remains.

A responsible intervention aimed at preserving organic materials and at the same time respecting the ethical meaning and dignity of the mummified human body, which the Academy decided to highlight with this meeting.