Tucson

Habeas corpus: disputed ownership has delayed scientific description of the Kouga mummy. Credit: ALBANY MUSEUM

The lock on a 2,000-year-old mummy's scientific secrets has been opened by a South African archaeologist — after a three-year wrangle with local tribes and landowners over its custody.

Johan Binneman, archaeology curator at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, found the mummy in 1999, during an approved expedition at a hunter-gatherer shelter site in the Kouga Mountains in South Africa's Eastern Cape province.

But government officials refused to let Binneman, whose work was publicly funded, present scientific data on the Kouga mummy until last month, when he attended the biennial conference of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists at Tucson, Arizona.

Last September, Maryna Steyn, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pretoria who worked with Binneman, was unable to present a manuscript on the specimen at the fourth World Congress on Mummy Studies in Greenland, pending approval by South African government officials.

The mummy is 145 cm tall and is thought to be a male of 50–55 years of age, possibly a shaman or a tribal chief. It was found in a near-fetal position — with its feet bound — and wrapped in leaves of a poisonous plant (Boophane disticha), a well-known coagulant. Researchers say that this discovery is the first of its age in southern Africa.

As well as problems with landowners, the find set off a tussle between local tribes. Two, the Inqua and the Gonaqua, laid claim to the mummy as a former leader. But provincial government officials — many of them from a third tribe, the Nguni — would not accept their claims.

“The mummy symbolizes our culture for centuries,” says Jean Burgess, chief of the Gonaqua, claiming that provincial officials had dragged their feet in allowing its full examination. The officials could not be reached for comment.

Binneman says the disputes are deterring archaeologists from exploring the Kouga Mountains site further.