 Hi all you far away first fans, my name is Lisa Bruno and I'm an Objects Conservator here at the Brooklyn Museum and I am looking forward to doing a Q&A with you on Facebook. So first of all, does everyone know what a conservator does or the difference between a conservator and a curator? It's a role in a museum? Okay well what a conservator does is they're responsible for the care and preservation of the works of art in the collection and the kind of training that you do to become a conservator is it's pretty much standardized now in the United States where you study art history, studio art and chemistry on an undergrad level and then in graduate school there's actually four programs now in art conservation in the United States and that's where you specialize into either paintings, paper, textiles, furniture or objects and at the Brooklyn Museum here we have paintings conservators, paper conservators and an objects conservator like me and by objects it means I deal with anything that's three-dimensional. So as you're all members of the museum you know that involves everything from ancient Egyptian objects that we'll be talking about tonight to contemporary plastic sculptures that were made you know two days ago. So it's a lot of variety and that's what I particularly love about the job and so should we get the lights? Sure. We're gonna do a little PowerPoint first and then we're gonna pull out examples of some animal mummies so you guys can actually look at it. Okay now the initial inception of this project to actually study our animal mummy research grew out of a project called to live forever which is actually a traveling exhibition which our curator Ed Blyberg he has a particular knack of going in the storage and looking at objects that haven't ever been on display at the Brooklyn Museum or haven't been on display in a long time and trying to think about new ways to present it to the public. So this exhibition discusses funerary practices from the Old Kingdom to Roman period but he's particularly focusing on how economics played a factor in that so if you were royal what would your coffin look like but if you were say less of means kind of like us what would your burial tomb look like what would your coffin look like what could you afford and that's the theme of the show and I'm really happy to say that it's actually coming to the Brooklyn Museum in February of 2010 so hopefully we can do some programming around that because there were some great objects that really have never been on display here and there were some really interesting treatments and part of this exhibition includes two dog mummies and a human mummy. We actually studied the human mummy for the exhibition. This is Demetrius. He was excavated in Hawara Egypt in 1910 by the British School of Archaeology and so then in 1911 he came direct basically from the excavation to the Brooklyn Museum so this is unlike some objects that don't have an archaeological provenance he actually has an actual provenance and part of the study he is part of a group of Roman mummies that are called red shroud mummies and that's because they're covered their final layer of linen is covered with this red painted shroud so there's probably about 14 known in the world and they're in all different collections. There are two actually at the Getty Museum and a scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute wanted to study these mummies so they came out to Brooklyn that took samples of the paint. The really interesting thing is he found that the paint was made from red lead and because it was made from lead you could do lead isotope analysis on it which they did with our paint samples was I think six others that they tested and they isolated the source of the lead to be from a region in southern Spain called Rio Tinto which today is a mining region as well which says something about trade routes in Roman Egypt that they were actually getting the source of this paint the lead for the paint from southern Spain but the really interesting thing is that all the trace elements were exactly the same for all of these samples of paint which would lead him to believe that it came from basically the same can of paint so all of these mummies were found at all different times in all different parts of Egypt but clearly they were processed and became mummies at the exact same time in the exact same place which is pretty fascinating so that was one interesting thing. The second thing was there was always a question about his age because when he was cataloged his fame portrait which is this here which is made from a really thin piece of wood had already been removed from the mummy because I think it was removed in the 30s here at the museum and we have a record of that because people were thinking we'll never put the mummy on display so they took the beautiful portrait off and that was on display for several years in the galleries and then the body was actually properly cataloged because of the spelling of the name Demetrius and because it was dirty at that point people actually cataloged him as being female because they thought it was a female spelling of the name and they also cataloged the name at the age as being 89 which our curator thought that doesn't make any sense I mean 89 is pretty old for an ancient Egyptian to live so how old is he really first of all he's a he and how old is he really and so we took the body to the North Shore Hospital and we did CT scanning which is actually a form of x-ray but it's a little fancier in that in an x-ray you look at the entire you look through one plane of the object but the entire object whereas in CT scanning you can actually isolate planes so here we have a cross-section and this is just a little refresher on how to look at an x-ray anything that appears white means it's denser and more radio opaque so this area right here this is actually his body and so the dark spots here are the tissues of his body whereas these are his arms here and here this is vertebrae this is his rib cage and these the doctors at North Shore said these were gallstones which could have had something to do with his death they looked at the body and said it was probably the age of a 50 something year-old man so that was interesting and then when we ended up cleaning the paint surface here the inscription of his age I think is here and it became much clearer that the symbol that was interpreted as an eight in the 30s when he was cataloged was actually five so so that inscription plus the scientific data plus the fact that of all these mummies that have been CT scanned their portraits do seem to be in conjunction with the same age as them so that all seemed to jive in terms of him being that age the other thing that we had to that we did is we did carbon-14 dating on the linens and he died somewhere between 300 BCE and 98 AC which makes sense that stylistically the portrait would have been first century and the carbon-14 dating also corresponds with that so that study is what really got our curator thinking that let why don't we take a look at all of the monkeys in our collection so Brooklyn has about seven humans and over 60 animals and there's a huge variety of styles and some of them actually include coffins like here's an example of an ibis coffin that's on display in the third floor galleries and it's a particularly special coffin because first of all it's made from wood that's been gilt and it has these beautiful mounts of the head and the feet made out of silver and it's actually a very unique object in the history of Egyptian art so when we took an x-ray of this what we find inside is actually you know a mummified bird which indicates to us that it is ancient the other thing and again looking at the x-ray you know that dense objects are radio-picts so it makes sense that the silver objects here are totally they're solid cast but the other thing that we notice is it's not fitting so tightly in here there's this other radio opaque material that's fitting around this and you think okay this is a really special object it was made really well you think the mounts would fit better into the wood I mean maybe not but it sort of makes us think well let's look at this a little closer so we actually did a metal analysis on the silver and unfortunately we found zinc in it which in all the studies that have been done on ancient Egyptian silver zinc is really not a component of ancient Egyptian silver so what does that say there are examples of wooden ibiscoffins that have copper alloy mounts of heads and feet and this just is this is just an example of the problem that can sometimes happen with objects that are collected that don't have an archaeological provenance because we got that ibiscoffin in 1949 directly from a dealer in Cairo so we don't have a history we don't know when those silver mounts were added now they could have been added in the 19th century sort of as a means of venerating the object immediately after it was excavated or it could have been added in 1949 as a way of like making this object more expensive and more special because you know they wanted to sell it to a museum like the Brooklyn Museum now I as an objects conservator my job is not to interpret that my job is just to present the information to the curator and it's I'm so glad that it's his job to actually interpret that but this copper alloy ibis head is actually also on display right now in the Egyptian galleries so another form of animal mummy coffin that's particularly special that we have are metal ones this is a figure of wajid boss which is a protector goddess and when we actually got brought this to the lab we just thought it was a statue at the time we didn't have an x-ray that was powerful enough to actually go go through the object so we couldn't x-ray it we knew that it had had been broken and repaired at the base and underneath like right here there was this plaster plug that was part of a restoration and the problem with the plaster is that it was retaining moisture and what happens a lot with archaeological objects is they've been exposed to saltwater so there's chlorides within the porous body of the object and chlorides and copper react with moisture to form this corrosion product that's called bronze disease which is particularly invasive and I can actually destroy the object so we knew we had to get the plaster plug out there's a lot of bronze disease and we had to basically treat the object so we started excavating and what we found inside were all of these bones which at the time when we were thinking this was just a statue we're like oh what's happening here so we contacted some animal mummy specialists and some other Egyptologists who basically said that they thought that the bones were from this animal which is an Egyptian mongoose called an ik-numan and ik-numans were protective in a way because mongooses kill snakes so it actually makes a lot of sense that a mummy of an animal who was killing snakes would be found within the symbol of protector goddess of Wajid Bas. So I think this gets to the heart of why the Egyptians made animal mummies because I think in the past a lot of people thought oh animal mummies are really just you know someone's pet they were mummified and put into a tomb because you wanted your pet in the afterlife or they mummified animals that could have been useful in the afterlife like something that you would eat and we actually do have examples of food mummies there's a corn mummy that's on display on the third floor but it doesn't actually explain there's a lot there's hundreds upon hundreds of animal mummies that are found in Egypt and they're not all in tombs they're in actual cemeteries and so I think a lot of the ways that Egyptian used animal mummies or their purposes were for more votive and sacred purposes. So in the Ptolemaic period which is 305 to 30 BCE there were actually royal decrees that said you must have these public processions and festivals to rejuvenate me the king of Egypt and so you were sort of culturally forced to participate and one of the methods to participate in these processions and there are Roman writers who write of this is making offerings of animal mummies. So if you think about it we find mummies that are like that beautiful gild ibis coffin and we also have coffins like this in the collection which is much simpler this is just a simple wooden coffin with a crocodile on top which probably would have venerated the god Sobek and when we brought this up to the lab to look at it unfortunately it was disturbed like the legit mummy so we're not really sure what was inside but we have another example of a mummy in the form of a cat which would have been venerating the god Bastet that wasn't actually disturbed. So this is something that maybe a more common person could have afforded to use in some of these public processions now when we brought it to the lab the curator thought oh there's not going to be anything inside but when we x-rayed it what we found was this jumble of little bones which you know it says that the first fact that not all animal mummies consist of a whole animal and it's quite possible that it was really a question of economics as to why this happened. So since there seems to be many uses for animal mummies there probably was many different ways to make them but this is sort of the traditional way that people thought that animal mummies and some animal mummies are made this way and it follows the way the human mummies are made exactly so basically you make an incision you do take out the internal organs there is a salt in Egypt called natron which is sodium carbonate which is totally common which kind of will dry out the organic tissues sort of like beef jerky or our rawhide and then if that would then get wet it would start to decay so the next step was actually seal the tissue or the organic matter all in with resins and tree sap and waxes and in the past people thought it was all done with bitumen which is coal tar and I'll talk about this a little bit later on they're finding that it's actually a lot more varied than that and then the whole thing was wrapped in linen bandages so here's an example of an animal mummy that's made in this traditional way this is a cat which is actually on display now on the third floor and it's actually very well preserved very well made it's very tightly wrapped here's a detail the face which when you go down to look at it you have to get in a kid's eye view for this because it's sort of in a big case low on the ground so you really have to get down to see it but the details of the face and it's all painted on so he's particularly beautiful and you can see some staining there which is due to resin that was to preserve the body now I know it's it's he's a pretty amazing one actually well we'll look at some other ones later but so when we took the x-ray we because he was such a specially made mummy we were kind of like not surprised to find a whole cat inside but what we found that was sort of interesting is there's signs of trauma first of all like here's your vertebrae right and there's a little space here where it's not white so that means that there's a little void there and then you've got another vertebrae another vertebrae another one and then oh my god you've got this huge area here that's like gray so there's a dislocation so it says his neck was snapped to kill him the other thing that was interesting is it's a pretty big tooth for a cat so we were kind of what's going on there and we're actually working with a vet from the NYU Animal Medical Center to help with animal identification and of all the studies that have been done of animal mummies of cats and the British Museum has looked at theirs and the Leiden Museum has looked at theirs there do seem to be these two groups there's this wild jungle or desert cat which seems to be one particular type of animal mummy and then there is also a second type of cat and this is the another version of a cat mummy which is less well preserved certainly less elaborately made although this one's also on display in the third floor and he has a fantastic stone coffin that he's associated with so presumably he was also relatively special just not in this high-state preservation as the other one so when we x-rayed this one we also found signs of trauma which you can see here is his little skull that's crushed so these are all breaks here and he doesn't have those big fangs and the shape of the head is a little different so this is the second type of cat which is the more domestic cat and the interesting thing about this is that now at UC Davis in California there is a vet who's doing a study to try to see if there's a DNA link between domestic cat populations of today and animal mummy cat populations of agent-agent so in doing our survey of all of our animal mummies if we have material that we can contribute to the study we're certainly going to do that the problem is is you have to have either a tooth or a femur and if you have a perfectly preserved well-wrapped mummy we're not going to open it up to get that material but we also have less preserved samples in the collection and if in working with the vet if we identify the right kind of material we'll certainly participate so let me show you one last cat sure why would they have killed it it's quite possible that it was either used during one of these public processions or it could have been used by priests at temples that were specifically set up for veneration of Bosted and it just at certain times of the year there would be a festival and they would make these offerings to the God as opposed to these mummies actually be being buried in someone's tomb and actually the second the purpose the votive and the sacred purposes I think is what most animal mummies were made for as opposed to being in someone's private tomb so here's another example of mummy that certainly looks like a cat but when we x-rayed him you don't really find a lot inside I mean there may be this might be a little bit of a bone this other radio opaque material probably stones and this is what people like to call fake mummies and in the past people would think of these mummies as being oh the priest was pulling a fast one on you know whoever was purchasing this and giving them something that they didn't think they were getting but the fact that they're so common and they're in every collection and they're every type of animal mummy you could look at it in another way and you could think well maybe it really is a question of economics and maybe someone could only afford so much money to buy an animal mummy to make as an offering and maybe what they could afford was this and it doesn't really have actual bones in it it just has maybe rocks that were associated with you know the mummification process or something again that's interpretation which I'm very happy that I don't have to do but we're going to move on from cats now the second another animal that was mummified a lot is the ibis and I actually brought this example out to show you so this is one common form of ibis mummification where you have the head of the bird here sort of turned back on its back and then it's the linen is folded in such a way to imitate wings and it's it's actually a really beautiful type of mummification and so when we x-rayed him it you see that it's a whole bird inside so that was you know particularly lovely then there's another form that was used for birds ibises and hawks in particular and this is called a humanoid form and you can see it sort of looks like Demetrius in the sense that instead of having a feyum portrait here there was so it's a wooden head sculptural head in the form of an ibis and it has an elongated body like a human and a little foot part here and this is particularly this is also currently on display in the third floor Egyptian Galleries and has this incredibly intricate pattern of weaving here so when we x-rayed this again we were expecting to find a whole bird and what we find is this and you're like what is going on with this in working with the vet he said this is definitely from an ibis this bone here but this bone here might possibly be from a cat and that was really intriguing to our curator because he's like well did they intentionally mix the ibis bone which would have been venerating cough with a cat bone that would have been venerating bastard again it's it's interpretation it's not part of my job or on the other hand it could just be well the person wanted to spend the money on the elaborate wrapping they couldn't really forward to have a lot of sacred material inside so there's just some remnants that they put inside I don't know it's it's interesting but it's incredibly common in in these animal mummies so another type of animal that was mummified was crocodiles and that would have been venerating the God so back the thing with crocodiles is you'll find them they're mostly small because if you think about it as a crocodile gets bigger and bigger it gets more and more powerful and more and more dangerous so difficult to keep and difficult to kill and that's actually one of the questions is how were these animals killed this is also on display in the third floor it's a very simple wrapping it's basically the dried crocodile under there one layer of linen and then this linen tape wrapped around it and when we x-rated we don't really see signs of trauma like we did with the cats you do see a crack here but because the vertebrae are all lined up this is something that happened postmortem so it could have happened during mummification it could have happened during excavation it could have happened during handling here at the Brooklyn Museum because really it's it doesn't have a lot of packaging around this mummy so when you you touch him you really feel the crocodile underneath and it's a dry and desiccated animal so you move it you know one way the wrong way you can get this kind of cracking so our animal mummy expert when she looked at this x-ray with our vet was like well there's apparently a theory that if you slit the nostrils of crocodiles they would suffocate and when she said this to us I thought well that makes no sense because you'd have to get really close to the crocodile to actually slit its nostrils and how can you possibly do that and our vet was kind of like no that doesn't make any sense either because they could still breathe even if their nostrils were slit so it's quite possible that crocodiles may have been poisoned as opposed to cats which do seem to have undergone blood force trauma to kill them but the theory is maybe they were poisoned which an x-ray is not going to be able to tell you one way or the other so another important animal that was mummified were bulls and there is a good bull deity called the apis bull that was found in Memphis and it's actually one of the first animals to be mummified in 1300 BC and I am so sad to say that the Brooklyn Museum used to have a bull in its collection but it was deaccessioned in 1950 but it was deaccessioned to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History so we know where it is and it's in safe care yeah because archaeologically they found that's it's been one of the oldest sites they found they've actually found the site where they mummified the apis bulls and there's these huge stone tables where they would you know eviscerate them and so and it's because of the pottery and other items they find in those areas that's how they generally do the dating so that's that's one way so we have we don't have our bull mummy anymore but we have this little model of a mummy and again this is one of these things where I think it's like six inches by eight inches and so the curators like I don't think there's anything inside but and we're having a technical problem again yeah I think it's maybe if we pause I don't know that one it's probably like eight inches by six inches so it's small and it does have a wooden component whoa what oh the ruler in all the pictures I think is six inches generally yeah yeah some of them are really small but so this on the interior has a pretty giant bone and we are working with our vet now to confirm that it's actually bovine but it kind of gets to the point that maybe a lot of these mummies were votive it's sort of not really unlike in medieval times when little bone fragments from a saint were put in shrines and then put in churches all around Europe I mean maybe this is a similar concept where you don't really need the whole animal you just need a part of the animal or something the animal touched if the animal is sacred enough it could be made into a mummy in this sort of manner would still be powerful and and useful for the purposes of the day so now we can do a little guessing game so here you go you see your ruler hit six inches long so you've got this little object now I did a similar presentation to a group of six graders and Queens at a public school who were studying animal mummies and you know I had said to them you can have food mummies you can have this so they all thought this was a yam how it's pretty creative on their parts actually so come on let's give some guesses what do you think this is a fish that's a good guess a rat that's a good guess corn that's a very good guess any more any more ready it's actually snake which is pretty cool yeah it's a really sweet little object all right the other part of this study that I sort of alluded to at the beginning is the resin analysis the University of Bristol in England was actually one of the first institutions to start looking at resins that were used in mummification and looking at specifically animal mummies to see if it's the same type of resin that's used in human mummification because in the past people would just think they're animal mummies it's like less important than humans they didn't use the same materials and actually what they're finding is the same materials are used the other thing that people used to think in the past before a lot of analysis was done well if it's this brown resin like this stuff here is all like this resinous material it's brown they called it bitumen which is this coal tar and actually what people are finding is that bitumen is really not what this is most of the time it really comes from different tree resins which again can sort of give us information about tree trade routes because you know there are certain cypress trees that may have been in Lebanon that weren't in Egypt but if we're finding cypress tree you know resin on animal mummies that were made in Egypt then it definitely says something about trade routes so we're really happy to be participating in the study with them and lastly I don't exactly know when this is gonna air but the animal planet cable network came to Brooklyn because this is Salima Ikram and she is our animal mummy expert she's actually one of the foremost she's in Egypt yeah she teaches that oh you did you're kidding me well she's famous that's very funny now I met somebody last night who knows her too but she teaches at American University in Cairo and she's made the study of animal mummies sort of one of her specialties she's actually mummified animals now to sort of walk through the process to see how it actually works and she took the producers of this program around to different sites archaeological sites in Egypt the collection at the Cairo Museum and she insisted that they bring them to Brooklyn because we actually have some really some of the nicest animal mummies around and so we spent a day filming and they're also going to the University of Bristol to interview the people who are doing the resin analysis so I think it's coming out in March but I'm not a hundred percent sure and so I would just say you know look at the TV stations for that it should be really interesting okay shall we look at some animal mummies now here's our little fake kitty yeah that's a type of ibis Shelly this is the one that you put out on that Twitter feed that was the fake snake bundle here's our little kitty what's that really a sweet but you can actually see like the linens partially gone there so you can see these are both ibis mummies this is sort of how they're often found in these kinds of ceramic jars just buried in the sand and it would have had like some sort of plaster resin and usually a bowl that would be a ceramic bowl on top and then sealed with a plaster resin