On the trail of the world’s best mummy sleuths

As head of the world’s only Institute for Mummy Studies, German microbiologist Frank Maixner has sampled a lot of ancient soft tissue. There were the thin, jerky-like strips of internal organs found stored in terra-cotta jars in a secret crypt beneath the main altar of the Medici family chapels in Florence, Italy. Those were discovered to contain evidence of malarial infection in a preserved blood vessel. In Switzerland, the mercury-laden mummified wife of a pastor turned out to be distantly related to former British prime minister Boris Johnson. Her stomach yielded the historic genome of the bug that’s still responsible for most gastric cancers and ulcers today. A Bolivian child mummy from around 700 years ago was so well preserved that her braided hair, pulled into pigtails, was soft to the touch. And, of course, there were dozens of ancient Egyptians, not to mention Ötzi, the fabulously well preserved Copper Age Iceman found on the border between Austria and Italy.

Still, it came as something of a surprise last fall to find Maixner deep in the world’s oldest operating salt mine, in Hallstatt, Austria. With Daniel Brandner, who works for the Natural History Museum Vienna, he had descended into a freshly excavated section. Looped along the narrow tunnel wall, a plastic hose carrying fresh air from the surface rustled gently. Their headlamps illuminated the salt-laden rock pressing in from all sides, transforming it into glittering pink-gray crystals. Then they found what they were looking for: an ancient human turd, embedded in the salt at about waist height. Many of Maixner’s most exciting findings have come from sampling the contents of his mummy subjects’ stomachs and guts—but researchers have found that same richness of human, plant, animal, microbial, and viral DNA once the material exits the body.

“This is quite loaded,” said Maixner, who, dressed in a white Tyvek jumpsuit, resembled an astronaut. He knelt next to Brandner to consider the sample from all angles. It had been laid down by an Iron Age miner more than 2,000 years ago, sometime between 570 and 552 B.C., yet it seemed disturbingly fresh, down to the brownie-like texture and faint—but distinctive—aroma.

Over the course of the next half hour, wielding tools that ranged from a pneumatic chisel to a paintbrush and tweezers, Brandner gradually extracted a sizable chunk of this priceless prehistoric poop. The atmosphere was tense—the pair froze each time a piece of the surrounding salt was dislodged—but thrilling, especially once Mohamed Sabry Sarhan, a colleague of Maixner’s at the Institute for Mummy Studies, exposed the interior of the excrement inside a portable UV-sterilized box, designed to reduce any chance of modern contamination. Deep inside the fibrous brown mass, shielded from the world for thousands of years, were hairs: two superfine and light, and two more that were thicker and darker. “We’ll see if we can get some DNA from the hairs,” Sarhan said, popping each one into its own airtight vial.

The next night, back at the institute’s headquarters in the Italian city of Bolzano, Sarhan stayed up late, plating the most promising samples on petri dishes filled with nutrient-rich jelly. When we returned the next morning, it appeared these millennia-old microbes had awoken from their extended hibernation and begun to reproduce. “I was expecting one or two species, but we see a lot of stuff, even bacteria with spores,” he said.

Later, Maixner speculated that this could be a world first: Pending replication and review, it seemed as though Sarhan had successfully cultivated at least one living microbe from an ancient human’s gut. “So if this was true, then this will be a really big story,” said Maixner. The discovery could offer a time machine of sorts, a way of glimpsing the ancient human microbiome in all its ancestral glory before it was decimated by the ravages of today’s ultra-processed diets.

The potential for scientific discoveries that led Maixner deep into the bowels of an Austrian mountainside emerged only recently, thanks to a combination of technological breakthroughs that have revolutionized the tiny world of mummy studies and the growing medical understanding that the contents of our guts can reveal more about us than pretty much any other part of our anatomy.

For most of human history, mummies have been thought to be fascinating, spooky, and scientifically irrelevant; skeletons were (and still are) where all the good DNA is for studying population migration and human evolution. Researchers generally favored hard evidence—bones and teeth—over softer remains, no matter how well preserved. But the past decade has seen a paradigm shift in our ability to detect and analyze all kinds of organic traces from much squishier parts of the body. The so-called “-omics” revolution—next-generation genetic sequencing combined with the computational power necessary to make sense of the resulting big datasets—has already transformed human health research. Now it’s giving archaeologists the tools to go beyond simply figuring out the age, sex, and ancestry of an ancient human to instead painting a holistic picture of his or her lifestyle, diet, and health, to get much closer to what it was actually like to be that person.

The Institute for Mummy Studies has, since its founding in 2007, become known as a leader in the field of extracting and decoding information from ancient remains—including still legible DNA for all kinds of human parasites, diseases, and microbes. This success has opened what Maixner calls “a new window back in time.” And, as it turns out, just like the preserved soft tissue of mummies, preserved soft feces are full of ancient biomolecules.

Unfortunately, like mummies themselves, well-preserved ancient feces are rare. Under normal conditions, excrement decomposes even faster than human bodies, and, in the rare cases it does survive, it has either hardened into a fossil, known as a coprolite, or is jumbled together in an ancient latrine, loosened from its ties to a specific individual and date. Forget pottery and pyramids: Today a well-preserved ancient turd is a treasure. That’s why, safe in their individual salty tombs, the dozens of Hallstatt paleofeces—along with the mine’s ancient wood infrastructure, datable down to the year—represent the archaeological equivalent of a winning lottery ticket.

Like most of his colleagues in the sparsely populated field of mummy studies, Maixner became an expert on organic human remains somewhat by accident. Careful, soft-voiced, and with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts, he was finishing his Ph.D. in microbial ecology in Vienna when he saw a job listing. The description was intriguing—the Institute for Mummy Studies was looking for someone to set up a laboratory purely for the analysis of ancient DNA. But Maixner was skeptical such a thing even existed. “It took me some time to believe that there are still biomolecules actually present in these ancient artifacts,” he admitted.

In the early 1980s, when Michael Crichton took the idea for Jurassic Park from an entomologist studying extinct DNA at the University of California, Berkeley, the proposition that the chemically unstable double helix could survive for thousands, let alone millions, of years was pure speculation. Then, in the 1990s, following the invention of a process that allows specific genetic sequences to be extracted from vanishingly tiny traces of DNA and amplified until they are identifiable, researchers claimed to find ancient genes in a 120 million-year-old weevil preserved in amber, in a 16 million-year-old fossilized magnolia leaf, and more.

“It appeared we were on a fast track to a new dawn in paleobiology,” writes biochemist Dale Greenwalt, a researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and author of a recent book that chronicles the study of ancient biomolecules. Unfortunately, many of these early claims turned out to be false: The DNA that had been multiplied came from tiny fragments of modern contamination, rather than the ancient past.

The next 20 years saw “a long controversy about whether ancient DNA was authentic,” said Albert Zink, a National Geographic Explorer and former Institute for Mummy Studies director. Sometimes it clearly wasn’t, but he and other mummy experts believed that sometimes DNA that was many thousands of years old really could be found in ancient remains. This heated debate was only put to bed in 2011 with the publication of a paper that found DNA in a mummified crocodile. “It sounds funny, but it was really a game changer,” Zink told me. “It was clear that it cannot be contamination because there were no crocodiles in the lab.”

Next-generation sequencing, which began making its way into laboratories in the 2000s, avoids the bias inherent in earlier methods. It reads all the DNA, rather than targeting particular snippets for amplification. Rigorous anti-contamination protocols conducted in special labs with equipment used only for the analysis of ancient biomolecules also helped restore credibility to the field. Nonetheless, mummies were still suspect. Zink, who first became hooked on mummies by way of a fascination with ancient Egypt, believes Tutankhamun and his kin might be to blame for the fact that mummies historically have been overlooked by serious researchers. “I worked a lot in Egypt, and the preservation is not the best,” he told me. “That’s why people said there’s no DNA in mummies.”

For centuries, Europeans saw mummies as only ground-up medicine. But after Napoleon’s failed invasion of Egypt at the turn of the 19th century inspired a fashion for all things Egyptian, mummy mania took hold, and “unwrapping” parties—where wealthy people unveiled ancient remains more in the spirit of P. T. Barnum than scientific inquiry—were the hottest ticket in Europe and North America.

The end result was that mummies were widely perceived as, at best, a curiosity and, at worst—once Western museums woke up to the fact that displaying other people’s ancestors as some kind of freak show was not a good look—an embarrassment. When journalist Heather Pringle attended the Third World Congress on Mummy Studies in 1998, she reported that “nearly everyone was gainfully employed doing something other than studying mummies.” Despite the perennial hold these eerily immortal bodies exert on the popular imagination, she discovered “there are few salaried jobs and very few full-time mummy experts.” Arthur Aufderheide, a Minnesotan pathologist who is often regarded as the father of modern mummy research—he co-founded the World Congress on Mummy Studies and authored the field’s definitive guide, The Scientific Study of Mummies, in 2003—complained in the book’s preface that it was “still an orphan discipline.”

Into this void stepped the Institute for Mummy Studies. It was launched nearly two decades ago as part of Eurac, a private research center established to study issues of interest to South Tyrol. Ötzi the Iceman was originally found on a glacial ridge above the Tyrolean Schnalstal Valley, and, after undergoing years of examination at Innsbruck University in Austria, he was finally repatriated to the South Tyrolean provincial capital in Bolzano. Eurac’s leadership determined that Ötzi merited an entirely new research division. “The Institute for Ötzi was the first name,” said Zink. “I convinced the director and the president that we should rename it, because my idea was to study all kinds of mummies.”

Zink and his team have indeed studied all kinds of mummies ever since; still, it was Ötzi that finally convinced Maixner that mummies were his future—especially after researchers rediscovered the Iceman’s long-lost stomach. Based on initial investigations, scientists thought the 5,300-year-old Iceman’s stomach had decomposed, but in 2009, the year Maixner joined the institute, a radiologist discovered it was not only intact but full, and had simply migrated upward during the process of mummification. In 2010, in a sampling campaign partially supported by the National Geographic Society, Ötzi was defrosted long enough to retrieve some of the stomach and intestinal tissue and contents, and Maixner began his analysis.

“When I identified ibex in the Iceman’s stomach content, that was the biggest surprise. That told me, OK, this cannot be contamination,” Maixner said. “It was a very special moment, for sure, looking at these samples and realizing what we can do.”

Some of the oldest mummies in the world can be found in South America, where the Chinchorro people of what’s now northern Chile began preserving their dead almost three millennia before Egyptian embalmers developed the process that eventually gave preserved ancient soft tissues their name. Yet most present-day South Americans don’t know that many of their ancestors were mummified—thanks largely to the Catholic zeal of the invading Spanish, who thoroughly extirpated what they saw as a heathen practice.

Bolivian biochemist Guido Valverde was an undergraduate studying hematology in La Paz, when he stumbled across a book from the 1960s describing techniques used to determine the blood types of mummies stored in the National Museum of Archaeology of Bolivia. When he asked the museum staff about the mummies, they had no idea how many they had in the collection or even where they were. “No one had access to these individuals,” said Valverde. “They were just left behind in the storage room at the museum.” (This is a surprisingly common fate: Tulane University, in New Orleans, once rediscovered two Egyptian mummies under the bleachers of its old stadium, from where they’d inadvertently attended three early Super Bowl games.)

“It took the museum two or three years of cleaning, recovering, and recataloging the individuals to at least have a preliminary understanding of what they had,” Valverde said. “They ended up with 50 mummies and more than 500 human skulls—it’s the largest collection of human remains in Bolivia.” His interest thoroughly piqued, Valverde wanted to use his biochemical training to unlock these mummies’ secrets. But there was an issue: “It’s very difficult to develop these projects in my country, because there are no laboratories with these kinds of standards,” he explained.

In 2017, Valverde reached out to Maixner. Having established themselves with the success of their multiyear analyses of Ötzi, Maixner and his colleagues have become go-to experts for anyone with mummies they want to learn more about. After analyzing a preliminary sample, Maixner confirmed that the DNA in the Bolivian mummies was sufficiently preserved to study. Then he suggested expanding the project’s ambition by including colleagues from the Institute for Mummy Studies who work on facial reconstruction and conservation, as well as the Horus mummy research team, an international group co-led by American cardiologists Gregory Thomas and Randall Thompson that began studying atherosclerosis in ancient remains in 2009. (They have yet to find a single culture that did not suffer from hardened arteries.)

Finally, with all the necessary permits in place, the entire team descended on La Paz to spend two weeks working with the mummies, carrying out CT scans and taking more than 400 samples for molecular analysis. Among their most intriguing early findings was the DNA of Streptococcus pyogenes. “It’s one of the most impressive bacteria: It can give you a cold, or it can eat your flesh,” Valverde told me. This is the first time the pathogen has ever been found in an ancient individual in the region—no one even knew it was present in the pre-Columbian Americas—and it seems to be a more ancestral strain than the version that circulates today, which means it could help explain the evolution of this exclusively human-associated bacteria. What’s more, the sample also contained genetic material from ancient viruses that attack this bacteria. Maixner told me that biomedical researchers think these could hold the key to developing a treatment that is effective against a broad spectrum of Streptococci, including the ones that are responsible for millions of cases of pneumonia, meningitis, and inflammatory heart disease every year.

Meanwhile, though it was not part of their original plan, Maixner and Valverde discovered that some of the ancient Bolivians had existing openings in their abdominal cavities through which the scientists could extract feces without causing any additional damage. “It turns out these are the most precious samples,” said Valverde. The full analysis, which Valverde expects will shed new light on the otherwise virtually unknown pre-Columbian gut microbiome, is still underway. The preliminary findings are groundbreaking. But for Maixner, they’re also frustrating. “Even though mummies are beautiful and I like them a lot, they have a limitation,” he told me. The thing that makes them so special—their exceptional, even unique preservation—constrains their relevance. “It’s only one, it’s an example, it’s a case study,” Maixner said, quoting typical responses to mummy research. “Those are our most hated words.”

Modern scientific studies pin the validity of their insights on replication, statistical significance, and representative sampling: The discovery of DNA in a single mummy can never conclusively make the case that ancient South Americans regularly ate quinoa or suffered from strep. Which is why Maixner was so excited when he heard that a salt mine in Austria contained dozens, maybe even hundreds, of perfectly preserved paleofeces.

The town of Hallstatt, set on a deep blue lake surrounded by Alpine peaks, is so breathtakingly picturesque that in 2012 Chinese developers constructed a near replica as a luxury community in Guangdong Province. Selfie stick–wielding tourists overflow the original, but most of them remain unaware of the real reason for the town’s existence: a salt deposit that has been mined for 7,000 years, creating a site so important within archaeological circles that it has given its name to the entire Proto-Celtic Hallstatt culture of Late Bronze Age to early Iron Age Europe.

“For prehistoric societies and all of the thousands of years before that, we need to remember that salt is vital,” said Daniel Brandner, from the Natural History Museum Vienna. “Without salt, you can’t survive.” Not only do we need to consume about a quarter of a teaspoon a day to prevent metabolic malfunction and death, but without refrigeration, salt was essential for food preservation. During the Late Bronze Age and for much of the Iron Age, Hallstatt was the main supplier of salt for central and eastern Europe. The mine is still operational today: Every year, Salinen Austria AG extracts 400 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of brine from the subterranean deposit to produce 320,000 tons of salt.

Brandner led us into the mine via a tunnel dug in the 1700s. We walked single file, stepping on the ties of the narrow-gauge railway the miners used to transport their gear. The smooth, whitewashed walls at the entrance soon gave way to dark, roughly chiseled rock, streaked with veins of the pink-gray salt. The air was cool and humid, with the sound of water slowly dripping in the background.

The prehistoric sites inside the mountain have all been discovered by accident, when early modern miners stumbled upon what came to be known as Heidengebirge, a German term used to refer to heathen areas. Researchers can’t just probe the mountain for empty voids, because they’ve been filled up—either slowly, by salt creep (under pressure, rock salt flows like a liquid, closing up tunnels at a rate of about half an inch a year), or quickly, during landslides that still threaten the area. One of those cave-ins, in 660 B.C., resulted in Hallstatt’s only recorded human mummy: an Iron Age miner trapped underground. The so-called “man in the salt” was found in 1734, with his leather shoes and some clothing intact, according to contemporary descriptions. “Unfortunately, it was too early for science,” said Brandner. “They brought him down to the priest and decided to bury him”—without noting where. He’s never been seen since, though Brandner suspects there may be more mummies concealed in the mountain. Only around 2 percent of the mine’s ancient workings have been excavated.

We followed Brandner up, down, and along the tight passages, crouching and slithering our way through a series of twisty, under-illuminated wormholes for 20 minutes, until he came to a stop in a small room, more than 300 feet beneath the Earth’s surface. “We are standing in the old Bronze Age cavity,” he said. “The catastrophe is all around us.” The landslides were a stroke of luck for future archaeologists: Because the mined voids were stuffed full of debris from the surface, their original dimensions were maintained. By drilling boreholes through the fill at different angles, Brandner has established that the original chamber was vast—at least four stories tall and the size of nearly five tennis courts laid side by side. All around us lay big limestone boulders, rubble, smashed wooden timbers, and an entire maple tree, dirt still clinging to its web of roots. Nearby beech trunks were used to precisely date its final year in the sunshine to 1063 B.C. Beneath us was the negative imprint of a staircase, cast like a shadow into the fill. The original—an intact 3,100-year-old wooden structure that is the world’s oldest known staircase—was safely stored in a climate-controlled room closer to the mine’s entrance.

All around us, jutting out of the walls, were spectacular organic remains that looked as though they’d been left there yesterday—a fragment from a fur cap, half a pickax, and a thick rope made of braided fibers from the inner bark of lime trees—but no feces. This excremental absence was pointed out with typical frankness by Kerstin Kowarik, a specialist in prehistoric archaeology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. “The Iron Age is full of shit,” she said. “In the Bronze Age, it’s much more rare.”

There are just six known Bronze Age poops at Hallstatt, and they are the only confirmed human remains from that era in the mine. Brandner assumes that this disparity in deposits is the outcome of the eras’ different mining styles. In the Bronze Age, salt was mined downward, whereas in the Iron Age, miners worked in horizontal chambers. “It makes no sense to shit on the floor when you’re mining downward,” he said. “But in the Iron Age, they don’t care; they can just leave it where it fell.”

The Hallstatt feces have been studied since the 1930s. An earlier generation of archaeologists dissected them under the microscope to find parasite eggs and botanical remains. But no one had performed a molecular analysis until 2019, when Maixner and his colleagues conducted preliminary tests on three feces from an Iron Age chamber and one from the Bronze Age, just to see whether there were enough intact ancient biomolecules to merit further study. To Maixner’s surprise, the DNA was astonishingly undamaged despite its age. From the lining of the gut wall came enough human genetic material to establish that each lump of excrement was the unmixed product of a separate individual, and all four were male.

The microbial DNA was even more plentiful, yielding sufficient data to allow Maixner and Sarhan to compare the guts of these miners with present-day Indigenous populations, which they resembled much more closely than they did modern Westerners. In particular, the team examined the diversity of a common gut microbe, Prevotella copri, which is associated with plant-based, unprocessed diets. All four feces contained the full repertoire of the microbe’s complex carbohydrate-processing capabilities, whereas Westernized guts typically lack some of that functionality. “This is something we’ve lost,” said Maixner. Curiously, one of the feces looked different from the others: less fibrous and more finely textured. Radiocarbon analysis revealed it actually dated back only to the 1700s—but, despite lacking the seed husks and straw of the older poop, it still looked more like the Indigenous microbiome than the Western one. “Somewhere after the Baroque period is where it all went wrong,” said Maixner.

The feces also contained enough DNA and proteins from food to allow the team to reconstruct the miners’ diet. Based on microscopic plant and bone remains, Hallstatt miners had been thought to rely heavily on a fava bean, millet, barley, and meat stew similar to a dish named Ritschert that’s still eaten in the region today. Traces of those ingredients were found in the samples, but one of the two Iron Age feces also contained walnut DNA—a luxury product that would have been imported from hundreds of miles away—as well as the telltale signal of the microbes involved in making blue cheese and beer, in what was also the first molecular evidence for their consumption in Iron Age Europe.

Sarhan studied these microbes in detail to establish whether they showed signs of being domesticated or wild—in other words, whether the miners were intentionally cultivating microbes to produce particular flavors in their fermented foods. By comparing the penicillin genome in the Iron Age poop to the mold used to make modern blue cheeses, such as Roquefort, as well as to its wild, food spoilage-related relatives, he showed that it was more than halfway along the evolutionary path to being a purely cheese-focused microbe. Similarly, the yeast appeared to be closest to those used to make today’s pale ales. “They were actively looking for specific tastes,” concluded Kowarik. “It’s evidence of an actual cuisine”—lost flavors that, thanks to their microbial traces, we can now not only identify but perhaps also even taste ourselves one day.

These proof-of-concept samples were retrieved pre-COVID. Thanks to the pandemic, combined with the bureaucracy of scientific grantmaking, the team’s return to the mine to sample dozens more feces had been significantly delayed. “I’ve been to the mine three or four times now, and each time, I’m like, please, Daniel, give me the sample!” Sarhan said, as we unpacked the scientific equipment. “Now we’re actually doing the samples, it’s like a dream.” The team members set themselves up in a small chamber carved off the main tunnel: Brandner was equipped with a red clipboard listing the feces and their find sites; Sarhan had a box of coffee-filled chocolates to keep his energy levels high.

After a slow start, the group fell into a rhythm. Brandner photographed each specimen; Maixner cleaned and weighed them; then Maximilian Piniel, an archaeobotanist, surveyed the specimens for visible plant parts, which Sarhan, working in a clean suit and sterile glove box, delicately tweezered out as he exposed the untouched interior of each excrement for the first time in thousands of years, to extract his crumb-size samples.

After three days, the team had sampled 30 feces. Sarhan was jubilant. In the entire scientific canon, he told me, there are fewer than 20 published molecular analyses of paleofeces performed using the latest technology, and about half of them have been done by the team at the Institute for Mummy Studies. “We doubled this, and we plan to do 20 more from [the museum storage in] Vienna,” he said, slapping his hands on the table for emphasis. At long last, Maixner told me, he will have assembled enough evidence to transcend the solo case study limitations inherent in mummy research—enough to be able to make authoritative statements about these ancient salt miners, from their taste preferences and their metabolic health to their parasite and disease burden.

The full analysis will take two years and involve partners in labs around the globe, but already it seems clear that the insights these feces will provide are intriguing. Kowarik rattled off a long list of questions she hoped might finally receive answers: Did everyone eat dairy? Did what they eat change over the seasons? How much meat did they eat, from which parts of the animal, and how did they process it? Maybe, she speculated, they will even solve “the case of the missing fish.” Archaeologists have found no fish bones and no fish-related parasites from the first millennium in Hallstatt, yet some of the Iron Age miners were buried with fishhooks.

Sarhan, who has a background in plant pathology, was particularly thrilled to find what he thinks is an intact wheat kernel with signs of smut, a fungal disease that can still wipe out harvests. The information contained in both of those genomes could ultimately help farmers today. Brandner estimates that only a couple dozen people mined the saltworks at a time. Given that many of the Iron Age samples came from an area mined over the course of just 18 years, it’s possible they’ll even have more than one sample from the same person and thus be able to build a biochemical portrait of a single individual’s diet and health as that person aged.

“The combination of clear dating … and still having all this information in the form of biomolecules—this is something unique,” said Maixner, who was so excited and yet so sleep-deprived by the end of the week that he seemed almost delirious. “This is truly a new way to travel back in time.”

A couple of days later, we met in the mountains again, this time on the Italian side of the Alps, at the ArcheoParc Schnalstal, near where Ötzi was found. The sky was still bright blue, but the air was cold and the larch-covered mountainsides glinted gold with the turning of the season. While Kowarik and Brandner excavate artifacts, and Maixner and Sarhan extract biomolecules, the ArcheoParc practices another technique for understanding the past: experimental archaeology. Its director, Johanna Niederkofler, has frequently collaborated with Maixner and his colleagues to make sense of their findings. While her partner, Stefan Tappeiner, peeled feathery tissues from a big, ridged bracket fungus and then struck two rocks together, again and again, to light them with a spark, she explained that the purpose of experimental archaeology is to learn by doing. If we lit a fire, sliced meat, and dried it in the same way the Iceman might have done, for example, what else would we realize in the process—and would we end up with the same stomach contents, molecularly speaking? To help make sense of Ötzi’s last meal, Maixner had asked Niederkofler to dry flint-cut meat in different ways. The results helped guide his ongoing analyses.

As we sat around the fire in the honeyed autumn light, bathing in its warmth and smoke while hungrily watching the meat we’d sliced using a flint knife dry and the flatbreads we’d made from the grain we’d ground puff up and burnish, Maixner explained why he’d brought me here. The new tools he and his colleagues have brought to the study of preserved ancient biomolecules—whether in mummies or feces—are enlarging our understanding of the past by leaps and bounds. “But you can’t explain these results without all the other tools of archaeology,” he insisted. “You have to combine.” By trying to re-create the cheese that miners at Hallstatt ate or the beer they drank, he said, we could see more clearly what we do know and what we do not—what is still interpretation.

We sat, talking and eating, a long way from the lab in Bolzano or even the salt mines of Hallstatt, immersed in an entirely different, more embodied understanding of the past. “This was the world for a long time,” said Niederkofler softly. Mummies, perhaps precisely because they preserve the tender part of humankind—the part that hurts and bleeds, eats and poops—speak to us. Finally, we have the tools to listen.