X-rays done in Texas could help identify Peru mummy

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas— The child had a name. But no one knows what it was. The Corpus Christi CallerTimes reports in 1957, a mummified child described as an “Inca Indian child from Peru” who died about 2,000 years ago was brought to Corpus Christi for the Junior Museum, now known as the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History.

Aalbert Heine, the Junior Museum’s first director, brought the mummy as a gift from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, his former place of employment, according to a 60-year-old Corpus Christi Times article. It was on display until the 1980s and has been in museum storage ever since.

“Starting a new museum was very exciting,” said Jillian Becquet, collections manager. “He brought tons of foreign artifacts, and this mummy was one of them. It’s the 137th to ever enter this museum. Now we’re up to millions.”

About a year ago, Becquet and Madeleine Fontenot, assistant curator of education, decided to repatriate the mummy to its country of origin. The museum employees have anthropological educational backgrounds and believe the most humane thing they can do is help return the centuries-old mummy home.

“(Having a mummy) doesn’t meet our mission as a museum (anymore),” Becquet said. “We don’t display human remains at our museum at all. There are protections in place now (for Native American artifacts and remains), but ancient people are not afforded the same protection.”

Fontenot believes removing the child from its burial place removed its historical context and may have contaminated it. The child was wrapped in an intricately woven rope that looks like a type of basket. There is cloth clinging to parts of the body, which can also have cultural significance, she said.

The natural history museum in New York has no record of the mummy, she said.

“(We think) it’s a 6-8-year-old female from Peru. That’s about all we know,” Becquet said. “People didn’t keep as good of records about anthropological expeditions back then, so probably either somebody looking to steal things from Peru … and not necessarily a professional removing her.”

A year of research through the museum’s archive system, decades of scrapbooks, and old newspaper articles led Becquet and Fontenot to seek the help of Driscoll Children’s Hospital for the next step in the repatriation process.