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Rising high above the South American Continent, the Andes seem untouched by earthly struggles. But their pristine, ice-capped peaks are haunted by a dark secret: a deadly mountaintop ritual. These frozen bodies all children date to the time of the Inca, the great civilization that ruled the Andes 500 years ago.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Archaeology, grade: A (1), The University of Southern Mississippi , language: English, abstract: Ice mummies like Kwäday Dan Ts’inchì and Ötzi are rare treasures which can tell us as much about the past as a history book can. The mummies could form, because of the combination of cold temperatures, ice and dehydration. With the help of methods like isotope analysis and carbon dating, researchers were able to make the mummies talk. Especially Ötzi has completely changed the way archaeologists see the stone ages.

Featuring a new Afterword, this is the spectacular story of the 1991 discovery of a Stone Age man in the Alps, a lonely frozen figure who offers clues about the world of 3000 B.C. 33 halftones.

The author of "Bodies from the Ash" and "Bodies from the Bog" takes readers on a captivating and creepy journey to learn about glaciers, hulking masses of moving ice that are now offering up many secrets of the past. Full color.

Owing to their unique state of preservation, mummies provide us with significant historical and scientific knowledge of humankind’s past. This handbook, written by prominent international experts in mummy studies, offers readers a comprehensive guide to new understandings of the field’s most recent trends and developments. It provides invaluable information on the health states and pathologies of historic populations and civilizations, as well as their socio-cultural and religious characteristics. Addressing the developments in mummy studies that have taken place over the past two decades – which have been neglected for as long a time – the authors excavate the ground-breaking research that has transformed scientific and cultural knowledge of our ancient predecessors. The handbook investigates the many new biotechnological tools that are routinely applied in mummy studies, ranging from morphological inspection and endoscopy to minimally invasive radiological techniques that are used to assess states of preservation. It also looks at the paleoparasitological and pathological approaches that have been employed to reconstruct the lifestyles and pathologic conditions of ancient populations, and considers the techniques that have been applied to enhance biomedical knowledge, such as craniofacial reconstruction, chemical analysis, stable isotope analysis and ancient DNA analysis. This interdisciplinary handbook will appeal to academics in historical, anthropological, archaeological and biological sciences, and will serve as an indispensable companion to researchers and students interested in worldwide mummy studies.