Tarim mummies travel

Three mummies have been transported to the U.S. to be displayed in the exhibit "Secrets of the Silk Road" (March 27, 2010 - July 27, 2010) at Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California:

• The "Beauty of Xiaohe" (1st image) is almost perfectly preserved - right down to her eyelashes - despite being 3,800 years old. The editor of the exhibit catalog calls her "the Marlene Dietrich of the desert."
• A mummified baby has stones covering his eyes and a nose stuffed with red wool. He had been buried with a "baby bottle" made of a sheep's udder.
• "Yingpan Man" (3rd image) comes equipped with grave goods and dressed in silk finery. He had been given a gold foil death mask in the Greek tradition and has a blond beard underneath.

The mummies date to the Bronze Age, but the story of their excavation begins in 1934 when their tomb complex was discovered by Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman (1902-1946). They lay inside a huge sand dune covered with 2,500 wooden stakes (2nd image) in the Lop Nur desert of western China. The Xiaohe tombs were rediscovered in 2003, just as Bergman had described them nearly 70 years earlier, by Idelisi Abuduresule, director of the Xinjiang Archaeological Institute. Careful excavation of just the upper 2 layers of the western section of the dune revealed 33 tombs and yielded 15 intact mummies. About half of the estimated 330 tombs have now been uncovered. "When we unraveled the cowhide used to wrap the coffins, the wood looked as fresh as the day it was buried, and the tombs' occupants lay cleanly in their coffins, free from the invasion of a single grain of sand," described Idelisi. The dead had been buried in boat-shaped coffins with woollen clothing and more than 1,000 cultural artifacts, including gold jewelry, straw baskets, stoneware, and jade and wooden carvings. The mystery of the Tarim mummies (also known as the Ürümchi mummies) is their inexplicable Caucasoid features, which suggest that they or their ancestors came to China from central Europe. It is unknown whether they were nomads, adventurers, or raiders along the Silk Road.

The exhibit will travel in 2011 to the Houston Museum of Natural History and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.