Seeing Inside

Digs & Discoveries May/June 2012

X-rays and computed tomography (CT ) scans of artifacts and mummies have been conducted for years now, but the unusual insights from these techniques keep coming.
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X-rays and computed tomography (CT ) scans of artifacts and mummies have been conducted for years now, but the unusual insights from these techniques keep coming.

CT imaging was used to look inside a mummified ibis from ancient Egypt (300 B.C.-A.D. 30), and showed that the bird had been packed with food, such as snails, for the afterlife.
(Courtesy Andrew Wade and the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, Division of Anthropology, ANT.006924.004)
Curators from Amsterdam's Rijkmuseum
transported their twelfth-century South Indian
sculpture of Shiva to the most powerful X-ray tunnel at the Rotterdam customs authority. They found, as they had suspected, that it was cast in solid bronze.
(Courtesy Rijksmuseum)
(Courtesy Stephanie Panzer, Trauma Center Murnau)
  • Artifacts May/June 2012

    Statuette of an Auriga

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  • Around the World May/June 2012

    Australia

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  • Digs & Discoveries May/June 2012

    An Elite Viking

    The transition from hunting and gathering in the Paleolithic period to sedentary agricultural lifestyles in the Neolithic may have been a long process, according to a research team working at Kharaneh IV, a 20,000-year-old site in Jordan.

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  • Features May/June 2012

    Archaeology of Titanic

    It has been 100 years since it sank, and 27 years since it was rediscovered. Now the wreck of Titanic has finally become what it was always meant to be: an archaeological site.

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