forensics | In the Artifact Lab

I just returned to work after 2 fascinating days of Death Salon: Mutter Museum, an event filled with presentations, speaker panels, Q&A sessions, murder ballads, a Dark Artisan’s Bazaar, and Death Quizzo.

Ask a Mortician! at Death Salon: Mutter Museum

I have attended many conferences, but none quite like this one. There were a wide variety of speakers presenting on topics related to death, how different cultures deal with death (both past and present), and our relationship to death and mortality. I spoke on the first day about my work on the mummies here at the Penn Museum – mostly about how we treat them today and how this has changed over time, using examples including PUM I, our baby boy mummy, Wilfred/a, and Nespekashuti. But you’ve heard about all of them before. Let me provide a brief outline of all of the other speakers, with links as appropriate.

Dr. Marianne Hamel is a medical examiner who spoke about what it’s really like to be a forensic pathologist vs. what you see on TV. She also was a consultant for the wildly popular podcast Serial and co-founder of Death Under Glass, which also had a booth at the Dark Artisan’s Bazaar, selling watches, umbrellas, notepads, etc. featuring beautiful forensic microscopic images.
Alexis Jeffcoat (Chemical Heritage Foundation) and Emma Stern (Laurel Hill Cemetery) spoke about the Friends of Laurel Hill Cemetery and their efforts to make Laurel Hill a place for the living as well as for the dead, with vibrant community programming.
Ryan Matthew Cohn spoke about historical skeletal preparations and models of the human body, along with his own work to make exploded and dissected skulls.
A panel discussion about American death spaces with Colin Dickey about the battlefields of the American Civil War and Bess Lovejoy on Hart Island: The World’s Biggest Tax-Funded Cemetery. I had never heard of Hart Island before, where unclaimed bodies and bodies of the poor and stillborn are soon to number one million. There are recent efforts to document the burials and transfer jurisdiction of the island from the Department of Corrections to the Parks Department.
Evi Numen, Mutter Museum exhibitions manager, spoke about the Curious Story of One-Eyed Joe and the 1867 Anatomy Act, discussing the struggle to legislate cadaver dissection and ownership.
Dr. Paul Koudounaris (a now 5-time Death Salon speaker!), who has extensively researched charnel houses and ossuaries, discussed various cultures’ relationships with the dead. He specifically shared information about Indonesian communities who mummify family members and exhume them each year to care for and celebrate them, and sometimes even keep them in their homes.
A panel discussion about anthropodermic bibliopegy (books bound in human skin) with Mutter Museum Curator Anna Dhody, analytical chemist Dr. Daniel Kirby, Juniata College Chemistry Chair Dr. Richard Hark, and Death Salon Director and USC medical librarian Megan Rosenbloom. Their project is aimed at surveying and creating an inventory of books bound in human skin, and they are using peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) to determine this. So far they have tested 22 books – 12 are actually human, while the others are sheep, cow, and even faux skin. The Mutter has the largest known collection in the world, with 5 authentic human skin books.
A presentation by Sarah Troop about the rituals and art of child death in Mexico. She discussed the tradition, which used to be practiced in many Latin American countries, where dead children become a hybrid between saints and angels called angelitos, and the most famous angelito, Miguel Angel Gaitan from Argentina, who died in 1967.
Dr. Norma Bowe discussed her death class at Kean University which she has been teaching for 15 years and has a 3-year wait list. She uses experiential learning in the class and they make several field trips, including to a hospice care facility, a Ronald McDonald house, a funeral home, a cemetery, a maximum security prison, a crematory, and a medical examiners office. A book has been written about her called The Death Class and its currently being turned into a TV show.
Elizabeth Harper spoke about incorrupt saints, which apparently aren’t very easy to identify just by looking at them. Her presentation included images of saints she’s visited and a little game of “Incorrupt or Nah”.
Artist David Orr presented his work photographing human skulls from the Mutter Museum collection and mirroring one side to create perfectly symmetrical results. This project, Perfect Vessels, can be viewed on his website.
Penn physician Dr. Erin Lockard spoke about death from the doctor/daughter perspective in a conversation with Death Salon Director Megan Rosenbloom. She shared her experiences both as a physician who specializes in geriatric medicine and how experiencing her mother’s illness and end of life has affected her work.
Mutter Museum Director Dr. Robert Hicks gave a presentation entitled Exquisite Corpses: Our Dialog with the Dead in Museums. He spoke about our relationship and discomfort around post-mortem imagery, and how other cultures are ahead of us in terms of articulating an aesthetic of death, decay, and mortality.
Christine Colby discussed the issues for transgender people in how to preserve their identity in death and and the work that is being carried out to assist transgender people and their families and friends.
The formal presentations of the conference concluded with a session entitled Ask a Mortician LIVE. Two morticians, Sheri Booker and Caitlin Doughty (Death Salon co-founder), fielded audience questions about their work.

The talks were incredibly interesting and often quite inspiring (and even tear-provoking), and there was an enthusiastic audience of at least 200 people by my count (probably more). The engaging day-time programming was supplemented by some terrific evening events, including behind-the-scenes tours of the Mutter, a Death Ball with a performance of 15th-century funerary music by The Divine Hand Ensemble, murder ballad performances, and a Death Quizzo. This conference had some of the best opportunities for people-watching too. Unfortunately I didn’t capture many photos but if you’re interested you can see some on the Death Salon Instagram account.

There is something I’ve mentioned before on this blog, but never actually shown, and that is the ability to “see” Egyptian blue on objects using multispectral imaging. On many objects Egyptian blue is very well-preserved, so there is no need for special examination techniques in order to spot it. But there are cases in which being able to accurately identify this pigment is important. Sometimes Egyptian blue deteriorates either by changing color (to green or black) or by becoming lost altogether, making it difficult to know which areas may have originally been blue, or if blue was used at all.

And then there are objects like this one:

Front view of the shabti box in normal lighting conditions

You’ve seen it before, it’s our painted wooden shabti box. I have been working on the treatment of this box for awhile now, mostly to stabilize the flaking paint and varnish. And this thick, orange-yellow varnish, which we believe is original, and is pistacia resin, makes it difficult to see the painted surface, both the details and the colors. While I could see that there is some green and possibly blue paint on this box, between deterioration of the paint and/or pigment, and the thick application of pistacia resin, I couldn’t say for sure which areas may have originally been painted blue…until now…

Taking advantage of the fact that Egyptian blue has luminescent properties when illuminated with visible light and captured in infrared, we can detect where Egyptian blue was applied. And wow, look at these results:

Visible-induced IR luminescence image of the shabti box. Light source: SPEX Mini Crimescope with 600nm band pass filter. Captured with a Nikon D5200 modified camera with an IR 87C filter.

This is the same surface of the shabti box seen in the first photo, but zoomed in a bit, and taken under different lighting conditions and captured with a different camera. The areas that appear white are where Egyptian blue was applied. Because everything else pretty much disappears on the box in this image, to better visualize where the Egyptian blue is in relation to other details, we created a false-color image in Photoshop:

False color image of the shabti box. The areas painted with Egyptian blue appear red.

In this false color image, the areas that appear red are where the Egyptian blue was applied. It’s not perfect (you can see that the bands in the hair of the figure on the right don’t really show up) but we could play around with the photographs a bit to improve this.

We did this imaging on all surfaces of the box, and on the box lids. Here is a regular photo, a visible-induced IR luminescence photo, and a false color image of one of the box lids, also showing lots of Egyptian blue:

Shabti box lid, normal light

Visible-induced IR luminescence photograph (areas in white = Egyptian blue)

False color image (areas in red = Egyptian blue)

You can use any regular/visible light source to produce the luminescence, but in this case, we used our fancy-schmancy new Mini Crimescope, which was developed for forensic work, but is useful to us because it allows us to examine objects under specific wavelengths of UV and visible light. We found that using a peak emission 600nm light source worked best for the excitation of the Egyptian blue.

In order to “see” the luminescence, we have to capture images using a modified digital camera, with an 87C IR filter.

In summary, we’re having lots of fun with our new equipment, and finding that these Egyptian objects are perfect subjects for learning how to use the Crimescope and the modified camera, because they produce such great, dramatic images.

In the Artifact Lab

Tag Archives: forensics

A recap of Death Salon: Mutter Museum

Glowing in the dark: multispectral imaging and Egyptian blue