As the most eccentric of all science conferences, the World Congress on Mummy Studies holds its meetings every three years in remote corners of the world. Presenting their latest and most dazzling mummy finds, the delegates explore what these often macabre discoveries have to tell us about ourselves. Science writer Heather Pringle attended one of these congresses in the remote Chilean city of Arica. Soon absorbed by the gossipy world of mummy experts, she listened to tales of bitter rivalries and broad rifts dividing mummy dissectors from mummy conservationists, and overheard bizarre cocktail conversations about the mummies of saints in Italy, the ancient child mummies of Chile, and the makers of Cold-War mummies in Moscow. (http://www.heatherpringle.com/books/mummy.html)
