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

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.…