Unusual. The mysterious mummified head gets a facelift at the Royan museum.

On July 23 and 24, the Royan Museum welcomed Laure Cadot, a conservator and restorer specializing in the treatment of organic materials, particularly human remains, to assess the condition of a head.

" This mummy has been in the museum since at least the 1960s, probably even earlier. We don't know its origins. It came from the old collections of the Society of Friends of the Royan Museum." The director of this museum, Isabelle Debette, speaks of a mummy head from Egypt donated by a certain Mr. Bourdier. "It is still partially covered with linen bandages and is presented on a pile of bandages from another source. A glass bell protects it. For many years, whitish deposits had been observed, and it was important to know their origin."

The museum therefore called upon the expertise of Laure Cadot, who came specially from Montpellier for two days, July 23 and 24, to assess the condition of this mummified head. It is not easy, in fact, to find specialists in the restoration of human remains, unlike documents.

We only know that it is a man because of the traces of hair on his beard.

After examination, Laure Cadot provided some information. "We have a good quality mummification. We have no information about this person's life. We only know that it's a man because of the traces of hair on the beard. The study of his hair under an electron microscope and his teeth, which are very altered and worn, shows that he was quite old." The intervention of the conservator-restorer notably consisted of studying the white spots covering the skull. "These are common clay deposits. So I'm going to dust them off, remove all risks of microorganisms." The specialist recommends continuing "to ensure the stability of the support, the temperature, the humidity and to limit the lighting, as light promotes the degradation of fabrics and linen."

Laure Cadot is an experienced specialist. She also works on mummies at the Louvre. Her career is punctuated by anecdotes, such as this intervention in Fougères, in Ille-et-Vilaine, where, at 6 a.m., she had to remove a mummy from the cemetery, place it in a conservation box, and scan it for study with her team. "It was a surreal moment in my career. The scanner allows you to see the inside, to carry out a health assessment of the body without damaging it, and to determine any pathologies."

For her, "it's an all-terrain job, an investigative job with the privilege of having truly intimate contact with the individual. The museum is the only place where we are in contact with dead bodies. We don't know the person, but it remains touching because this human has crossed millennia and reached us. Today, we no longer consider human remains as objects as we did for years. We had lost or we did not have this awareness of their humanity. That's why we made them museum objects." Today, she gives them a second life.