Anthropology can be tediously hard work.  There’s no theme song, no Indiana Jones hat, and no snappy quick whip—although there may be a lot of travel involved.  For one real-world scientist based in North Dakota, the adventure is often an intrinsic one.

Heather Gill-Robinson, who has been on staff at NDSU since September 2005, is one such scientist.  This weekend she’s heading back to Germany for more work involving six red-headed mummies and a skeleton found in a peat bog there. 

Gill-Robinson is one of a very few people in the world (and the only one from North America) allowed to handle this particular group of mummies.  She said Mummy Studies itself is emerging as an anthropological sub-discipline.  As a career, it’s something she fell into after seeing a peat bog mummy and wondering why it was so well preserved.

“I asked how it worked and no one could tell me,” she said.  “I’ve been trying to figure that out for the past 20 years.”

During her research for her master’s degree, Gill-Robinson studied how peat bogs make mummies by burying dead piglets in bogs.  Her work, which showed that water levels make a difference in body preservation, was a good lead-in for the mummy research she does now.

But even after the piglet study, it took a long time for her to be able to work with the peat bog mummies.  The real research began when she was finally accepted as part of the team.

“I spent months in the archives before I actually touched the bodies,” she said.

Gill-Robinson said Mummy Studies is as non-invasive or minimally-invasive as possible and involves several scientific disciplines.  Some colleagues run DNA tests.  Some do CT scans of the bodies, and some do chemical testing with stable isotopes.  The list goes on.

And don’t be fooled by the red hair.  The bog makes the mummies’ hair that way.  How it happens is one of the mysteries that Gill-Robinson gets to work with.  And she continues to investigate the connection between water levels and preservation.

“If I can crack that, I’ll be a happy person,” she said.