Digging the dirt on the mummies of St Michan's

A team from the National Geographic channel visited Ireland this month to film a series on the mysterious mummies in the crypt of St Michan's church in Dublin, writes Rosita Boland

Mummies are like dinosaurs. They're old, they're mysterious, they're long-dead and the people love them. They've proved to be such a popular subject that the National Geographic channel has recently made two seasons of a programme called The Mummy Road Show. This month, a National Geographic team came to Ireland to shoot the last programme in the second series. The four mummies in Dublin's St Michan's on Church Street were the focus of their attentions. We don't have Tutankhamun and the Pyramids, but we do have a church with an organ on which Handel is reputed to have practised his Messiah, and we have four mummies in the church's crypt, which have been given names which include Thief, Crusader and Nun.

It's mid-morning on a bright day of rare sunshine and the crypt of St Michan's looks even dustier and dimmer than usual, with its dirt floors and spiderwebs hanging everywhere. Cheery, gung-ho and enthusiastic co-presenters Jerry Conlogue and Ron Beckett are focusing their attentions on the mummy called the Crusader, stepping carefully around the other coffins. The space in the crypt is so tight the producer/cameraman has to stand in the doorway outside. The schedule is tight too: three days. Most feature films, for instance, rarely get more than two minutes in the can per day of filming. It will be a year before the St Michan's programme goes on air. Back in Washington, a team of post-production people will watch some 30 hours of film shot in Dublin and edit it down to 23 minutes.

This is the first time the mummies of St Michan's have undergone such intensive examination. Despite the nicknames they have acquired over the years, nobody is sure of their original identities or even how old they are; it is thought they are between 400 and 800 years old.

In 1997, Conlogue developed an x-ray technique with lightweight, compact equipment using Polaroid film which enabled him to produce images on the spot. It's a non-invasive method of examining a mummy; no unwrapping is required. His colleague Beckett uses an endoscope (usually used in medicine) a tiny video camera attached to a long flexible tube and used to explore the inside of a body. Between them, their work can reveal the sex of a mummy and its age at death, and usually the cause of death. They can also use radio-carbondating, which tells how old the mummy is.

"We reconstruct fragments of the past," Conlogue says. "We try to get these mummies to tell us their stories, open a window to the past."

According to Beckett, "It's not about finding treasure contained in coffins. The riches to us are what the bones and teeth of these mummies can tell us." It's the "process" that intrigues the documentary-makers, and it is captured by the camera: the set-up for their shoot, what the x-rays reveal, what the endoscope finds and how the two men piece together their findings.

In Peru, the team examined 205 of the famous Chachapoya mummies and were thus able to draw conclusions about the health and living standards of an entire community. "With that many mummies, it's a sample," Conlogue explains. "What we're doing here is a survey, looking at individual mummies."Look at this," he says, indicating the coffin containing the Crusader mummy, thus called because what remains of his legs are crossed in the way a Crusader was laid out. "He looks like he has a real puffed-up chest, right?" He does indeed, but only because he is lying on top of another mummy, for reasons unknown. Under endoscope examination, the Nun mummy is shown to be missing part of her vertebrae. "The coffin is not as old as the mummy," Conlogue notes, "so it's possible the rest of her vertebrae are in some other coffin."

Although the original plan was the focus on the Crusader mummy, initial examination of all four reveals that the most intact one is the Thief. "That one has the most potential to tell us something," Beckett says. Thus later that afternoon, the Thief will be wrapped in cling-film and brought in a hearse to St James Hospital for a CAT scan.

"With a CAT scan, we'll be able to see if there are remnants of any organs left behind. It will create a potential for further study later," says Beckett.

Cling-film, that kitchen stalwart, is apparently capable both of protecting a mummy while in transit and also of preventing particles being possibly released into the air of the new location. Never has such humble kitchen equipment seemed so romantic. To paraphrase Mrs Beeton, you have your cling-film, now catch your mummy.