ENVIRONMENTAL SIMULATION FOR SAFE PRESERVATION OF WET MUMMIES, THE CASE OF 'OETZI', THE MAN FROM THE ICE

摘要

The archeological signs of the past are very impressive when discovered but the first arising question is how to preserve them for the future. Particularly in case of organic material, like human bodies, the technical issues relevant to the preservation environment are very critical and the design requirements often fight with the physical laws. One of the most important discovery in this field was "Oetzi" the man, or better the mummy, found in the Similaun glacier and 5,500 years old. The peculiarity of this mummy is that is "wet" and not "dry" like the Egyptian mummies, to keep this treasure, witnessing of the human evolution, a special thermal safe was conceived, designed, manufactured and presently maintained in the museum of Bolzano , Italy. These kind of applications require the maximum care and special technical solutions in order to : create in a clean room the proper climatic conditions as -6℃ of temperature with nearly 100% relative humidity; ensure the proper lighting avoiding dangerous radiation; provide a very accurate measurement and control system including color and weight of the mummy; provide the maximum reliability of the system by a redundant and fail safe configuration which avoid any possible damage to the mummy. Pratically the environmental chamber technology has been taken as the baseline to implement a state of the art preservation system which successfully demonstrate that wet mummies can be preserved and at the same time can be shown to the future generations.