Forensic Science: Bodies of Evidence
Studying Disease Effects in Underserved Youths
Quality Management in Health-Care Settings
Changing the Cancer Treatment Paradigm
Unwrapping Secrets of the Ancient World
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Unwrapping Secrets of the Ancient World
It was my turn to lock the museum and set the security system, a job I hadn't done since Marion's death. True, there was a policeman posted outside the building who did regular rounds, but he was somewhere else right now.
It was easiest to begin in the hallway at the front of the museum and exit by the back door. I flicked off lights in the Americas and Egyptian galleries, and crossed through the Classical gallery to get to the European gallery.
I set the alarm, grabbed my briefcase and purse, and made for the exit at a smart pace. I had only thirty seconds to get out and lock the door before the alarm would trip. I hit the last switch behind the triptych and opened the heavy back door.
Thump.
The noise came from behind me. My briefcase slipped out of my hand and landed with a thud by the door. The door swung shut, leaving me still inside the museum....
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Sarah Underhill Wisseman, M.A. '76, Ph.D. '81 |
In her first novel, Bound for Eternity: A Lisa Donahue Mystery, Sarah Underhill Wisseman, M.A. '76, Ph.D. '81 (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology), tells the story of a young museum curator who unwraps the secrets of a 2,000-year-old mummy and follows the clues to solve two murders in her dusty old Boston museum. The heroine bears more than a casual resemblance to the author, whose first day job as curator of ancient art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's dusty old World Heritage Museum required her to lock up at night.
"It was very creepy to be the last person to leave, flipping the switch, and racing for the door in the dark," Wisseman recalls. "The more I thought about it, the more I thought that it was the perfect setting for a murder mystery. It was the book I had to write."
Bound for Eternity is the companion novel to Wisseman's 2003 nonfiction book, The Virtual Mummy, which describes a ground-breaking interdisciplinary study of the museum's Roman-period Egyptian mummy with nondestructive analytical techniques. Using radiography and CT scanning, the team "virtually unwrapped" the mummy to analyze the remains. They identified the mummy as that of a 7- to 9-year-old child from the Fayum area of Egypt, who died about A.D. 100.
For the first time, a Cray II supercomputer (this one at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications) was used to render three-dimensional images of a mummy.
"The imaging technology we used in 1990 has been superseded by higher-resolution X-ray and CT scanning technology," Wisseman explains. "Today many more museums are using these imaging techniques on their mummies."
Hooked on Archaeology
As an anthropology undergraduate at Harvard University, Wisseman participated in a summer program in Israel, including an excavation at Beersheva, "which changed my direction from 'Margaret Mead' social anthropology to archaeology.
"That site has been fought over for so many centuries, one can almost hear marching feet," she recalls. "The immediacy of it grabbed me, knowing that practically everything I touched had a history. That summer thoroughly hooked me on archaeology."
In 1986, Wisseman's career began to shift when she participated in an interdisciplinary research project of the Program on Ancient Technologies and Archaeological Materials. "ATAM was performing neutron activation analysis to identify the composition of some Roman pottery in our museum," says Wisseman, who is now director of the program. "This process provides a chemical fingerprint of the clay, which helps us answer questions about where particular pots came from and gives us a picture of trade in the ancient world. I realized that this was the niche I wanted to develop."
Closer to Home
Recently, Wisseman and colleagues in the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program conducted an interdisciplinary project using PIMA (portable infrared mineral analyzer) spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction to identify the source of raw materials used to create stone artifacts, such as red goddess figurines from the Cahokia Mounds in Missouri. "It had been speculated that the raw materials came from Minnesota or Arkansas," she says. "However, when we examined museum artifacts and quarry samples using these two techniques, we found a match at a quarry near St. Louis."
The team is planning similar work in the Southwest. "It's interesting that my career has evolved from a background in classical and Near Eastern archaeology to working with North American archaeologists on projects much closer to home," Wisseman observes.
Still, it is teaching that Wisseman finds most rewarding. In her honors-program course, "Materials and Civilization," she draws on ATAM projects and develops classroom debates about questions such as the origin of the Shroud of Turin. "My students read the history and scientific analyses, and debate its authenticity," she says. "They always see new angles and nuances."
As Wisseman tells her students, "Archaeology is like a giant jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. You piece together what you can, and then you go to the limits of the physical evidence and speculate a little more.
"It is also similar to detective fiction—you are putting together clues about how people lived, and how they moved around the ancient landscape."
The excerpt from Bound for Eternity is reprinted with permission of the author; read more about Sarah Wisseman's novels and short stories at http://www.sarahwisseman.com/.
Dorothy Wright contributes news and feature articles on science, technology, engineering. and general-interest topics to a variety of publications, including Civil Engineering and Engineering News Record .