By 2008, the condition of a Papuan village leader named Moimango had already been deteriorating for decades as he sat on the side of a cliff roughly 1,000 feet above a valley floor. His position beneath an overhang protected him from rainfall, but wind erosion was still slowly taking its toll.
Moimango had spent quite a lot of time up there since he passed away in the early 1950s. After his death, he was mummified in a traditional process that had been conducted for generations by the Anga people of the highlands of northern central Papua New Guinea. But his son, Gemtasu — a clan leader himself in the village of Koke, located below the cliff — was concerned about losing a visceral connection with his father as his body degraded.
In 2004, biomedical scientist Ronald Beckett was attending the World Congress on Mummy Studies in Torino in Italy when he learned of the Angas’ tradition. Ulla Lohmann, a photojournalist who had worked in Papua New Guinea, told him Gemtasu wanted to restore his father’s mummified corpse and rekindle interest in traditional mummification processes.
At the time, Lohmann asked if Beckett, who works at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and has long researched mummies in other parts of the world, if he would be interested in traveling to Papua to observe and help restore the decades-old mummy. “She told us an amazing story about the village elder, named Gemtasu, who wanted to carry on the process of mummification,” Beckett says.
