Mummy Mavens Unwrap Preservation Methods
木乃伊是如何炼成的？
In 1994 researchers made a mummy. Now scientists have reverse engineered the process to figure out how it's done, with the mummy makers still around to tell them how they did.
1994年，研究人员制造了一具木乃伊。现在，在木乃伊制作工匠的帮助下，科学家通过还原工程弄明白了木乃伊是如何形成的。
撰文 辛飞亚·盖博（Cynthia Graber）
翻译 M
审校 李轩
Mummies. They’re the stuff of horror movies and happy archaeologists. Now the American Association of Anatomists have turned their attention to mummies—they’ve devoted the entire latest issue of their journal, The Anatomical Record, to the subject.
木乃伊——这些在电影中制造恐怖，却让考古学家癫狂的家伙们。现在，美国解剖学家协会将目光转向了木乃伊。他们将他们最新的整整一期刊物《解剖记录》贡献给了这个课题。
Papers in the edition cover topics such as the bog bodies of northern Europe, the intestinal contents of a Korean mummy, a case study for an Egyptian mummy with a prosthetic toe, and a code of ethics for research with ancient human remains.
论文涵盖了北欧的沼泽炭人，朝鲜木乃伊的肠道内容物，对带有假脚趾的埃及木乃伊的案例分析以及研究古人类残骸的道德规范等。
Most mummy research is done on actual discovered remains, but some investigations try to reconstruct mummification techniques to figure out just how ancient peoples did it. For example, in 1994 researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore attempted to recreate Egyptian mummification, using a donated cadaver. In a paper in the new mummy issue, scientists conducted a variety of scans on that cadaver to see if they could figure out the process without asking the researchers who did the 1994 work.
大多数研究是基于已发现的残骸而完成的。然而，部分研究试图通过重现木乃伊化的技术以找出古人如何制造木乃伊。例如，1994年，来自巴尔的摩的马里兰大学的研究人员试图使用捐赠的遗体重现埃及的木乃伊化过程。在有关制造新木乃伊课题的一篇文章中，科学家对1994年研究所完成的新制木乃伊进行了各种各样的扫描，他们试图在不询问制作该具木乃伊的研究人员如何制作的情况下，找出制作木乃伊的方法。
They determined that the body was male, likely elderly, and probably a modern professional in the “middle or elite social class.” The authors also describe the incisions and the embalming materials that they could ascertain from the scans. They then took the results to the original embalmers, who deemed their findings to be largely correct. [Andrew D. Wade et al, MUMAB: A Conversation With the Past]
他们确定遗体为男性，可能是老人，大概是一个"中产或精英阶级"的专业人士。作者还描述了该具木乃伊的切口以及制作它所用的防腐材料。他们通过扫描确定了这些信息。接着，他们将结果与古代的木乃伊的研究进行对照，他们确认他们的发现很大程度上是正确的。[Andrew D. Wade et al, MUMAB: A Conversation With the Past]
These kinds of comparisons provide a method to test the accuracy of our evaluation of mummies. Because many of the secrets of the ancient Egyptian embalmers are, as has been said, lost in the sands of time.
这些对比为我们提供了准确分辨木乃伊的方法。因为许多古埃及尸体防腐的秘密，如熟语所说，遗失在了时间的流沙中。
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