Hi everyone! This is your host KC and welcome back to season 2 of Museum Musings. I hope you enjoyed your summer and got some R&R time in the midst of the all the chaos that comes with summer. I hope some of our summer treats were fun for you as well.

You can listen this episode on Spotify and Google Podcasts.

It is so good to be back and take you on this wonderful journey once more. I hope you’re ready for this trip, because I’m taking you to Miami! I had been planning to visit a friend and I said “hey, let’s go to the Frost Science Museum.” And so we did!

The Frost Science Museum is actually a really neat museum. It is mostly geared towards kids, however, they did it in a way where it was fun for adults too. The museum is a multi-level building with fully outdoor hallways, so you never feel closed in. They have a giant fish tank that you can check out on all of the levels, which is a great way to give you a sense of what you find in the different ocean levels. It was neat to see a hammer shark! On a previous trip with another friend to an aquarium, I found out I have a thing for jellyfish, and I dare say Frost Science had some cute baby jellyfish.

The key exhibit on display during my visit was “Mummies of the World: The Exhibition.” It is on display until September 4, 2023. The exhibit feels like a well thought out exhibit. With this being said, there may be some information in this episode that might not sit well with some sensitive listeners so proceed with caution. There were several museums and academic entities participating in this traveling exhibition. You can’t have a mummies exhibition without having anything Egyptian based, and yes there was an Egyptian mummy.  There was even a display that allowed you to touch material mimicking how the different types of mummies feel (I did do it and the flesh one did freak me out a bit, even though you weren’t really touching a mummy!). I had been to a similar exhibit a few years ago at the Orlando Science Center. I don’t really remember that one too well. The Frost Science Museum starts off the exhibit with precisely what you want to see, Egyptian mummies and some of the funeral regalia associated with them, such as the funeral masks, some mummified animals, jewelry, the infamous canopic jars representing different Egyptian gods and where internal organs were kept so the gods could guard them in the afterlife. There were Peruvian mummy bundles and a couple of shrunken heads. I will say I’m not a fan of these shrunken head war trophies. They also had a display regarding naturally occurring mummification and bog bodies. The room for the exhibit was dark and cool, and that was the same experience at the Orlando Science Center, which got me wondering about how mummies can be displayed differently and in a brighter atmosphere (more on this later). There was a good mix of groups of adults, families with small children, even a few solo adults. They touched on some of the hard to swallow history regarding treatments of mummies, which is important to acknowledge in order for visitors to fully grasp what they are walking through. What is the sordid history of our mummy mania?

Our fascination with mummies goes way back, one researcher dating it as far back as Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and entrenched further by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 (1). The lure of what we consider exotic is irresistible for humans, and what is considered exotic is different for everyone. Apparently, a lot of us thought mummies were exotic and thrilling enough to have mummy unwrapping parties, where people purchased a mummy and then undid the wrappings. I was shocked when I heard of this while working on my bachelors degree. But wait, we don’t stop there. We also used mummy skin, mummy liquid, and ground mummy as paint and ….medicine. Yes, some people prescribed P. Mumia to supposedly help with different ailments. There is a plethora of things that mummies have been used for, other than in museum displays, and it can be quite disturbing. Having this sort of information as you walk through an exhibit will affect how you view what is before you. What I want you to walk away with from this episode is the importance of you leaving an exhibit more informed than when you walked in – to the point where you can sense the weight of the conversations held behind the doors about the exhibit you just saw.

The exhibit wasn’t only about Egyptian mummies.They also touched upon European mummies and medical mummies. Medical mummies are quite an interesting subject. We all know about medical cadavers and their use in medical schools to teach human anatomy. However, Scottish anatomist Allen Burns found a way to dissect, taint, and preserve/mummify parts of the human body (2). Burns was incredibly interested in the vascular system therefore all of the specimens are keenly attuned to that focus. His work is actually quite remarkable. The level of precision and care to expose the muscles, tendons, organs, etc is incredible; and kind of made me think a little bit about serial killers. How he mummified the specimens we don’t totally know, but maybe it’s better that we don’t know.

You can’t talk about mummies without talking about ethics in displaying the deceased – should it be done, and how it should be done. What I liked about this particular exhibit is at the end of the room, they acknowledged that it is a difficult subject for museums to broach. They had a magnet board where people could take a magnet and decide where on the mummy display scale they stood, which is a good simple way of providing the audience with a sense they have a voice in the matter instead of keeping it with just professionals. While doing a little research for this episode I came across an article by Jasmine Day, published in the journal Papers on Anthropology journal, where she talks about how over the years the public in a way was removed from these types of conversation. Actually, there’s two articles I came across written by Day on mummies and their display and they are interesting reads. Her Mummymania: Mummies, Museums, and Popular Culture is from 2005, while not a recent article, is a great read on how popular culture has shaped our view of mummies over the years.

To bring us to the subject of how mummies are displayed, I do believe that the display of mummies is not a bad thing so long as it is done in a respectful manner that evokes visitors to be respectful. Jasmine Days’ article ‘Thinking it, makes it so,’ is a good article explaining how creating a virtual tomb helps create the atmosphere of reverent silence. This is where the low lighting comes into play, and the very similar method of display between the Orlando Science Center and Frost Science exhibitions. The Frost Museum took this a step further but having these very sheer sorts of nets dividing the different sections so that it felt continuous like one exhibit, but you understood you were walking into a different subject of the mummification topic. Given the heavy nature of the topic, you are walking through the presence of usually actual human beings, having this sort of atmosphere helps people think about their own mortalities, which is not easy to think about. At the core of mummy exhibitions is the death and how it is viewed across the world, and it is essentially posing the question to the viewer “What is your personal view on death?” and forcing them to think about their personal limits. It is a somber and humbling question and exhibit which perhaps not everyone catches onto.

Do you think it is appropriate to display human remains? You can tell me your thoughts on our website, or on Instagram where we have a poll you can participate in.

Footnotes:

1) Jasmine Day, “Mummymania: mummies, museums, and popular culture,” Journal of Biological Research – Bollettino Della Società Italiana Di Biologia Sperimentale Vol 80 (1), 2005, https://doi.org/10.4081/jbr.2005.10226.

2)  Ronald S. Wade, “Medical Mummies: The history of the Burns collection,” Chungara: Revista de Antropologia Chilena Vol 33 (1), January 2001, 99 – 100.

Bibliography

1) Day, Jasmine. “Mummymania: mummies, museums, and popular culture, Journal of Biological Research.” Bollettino Della Società Italiana Di Biologia Sperimentale Vol 80 (1), (2005): 296-300. https://doi.org/10.4081/jbr.2005.10226.

2) Wade, Ronald S. “Medical Mummies: The history of the Burns collection.” Chungara: Revista de Antropologia Chilena Vol 33 (1), (January, 2001): 99 – 100.