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“People often ask me, ‘Why do you want to study the dead?’ I never would have guessed that I’d be ‘the mummy girl.’ But when you follow the trajectory of my Northwestern experience, it makes sense. I originally came in as a biology major. And then I took an anthropology course and just fell in love.
“I worked at the Field Museum for a year with the curator of biological anthropology, performing image analysis of CT scans of Peruvian mummies. That experience ultimately served as the inspiration for my Circumnavigators project.”
Catherine Althaus, a biological anthropology major from Madison, Wis., and winner of the Circumnavigators Travel-Study Grant, visited 10 countries in 11 weeks last summer to analyze differences in the display and treatment of human remains in various collections, from the British Museum’s vast collection of Egyptian mummies to the Chinchorro mummies — the oldest in the world — at the Museo Arqueológico San Miguel de Azapa in Arica, Chile. In July, Althaus will move to Ecuador, where she will spend 13 months leading community development initiatives as a program director for Manna Project International.
Check out Catherine Althaus' reflections on her adventures on her "Bare Bones" blog.
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