Dispuestos en criptas e iglesias, con cráneos lascivos y piel de pergamino, los muertos disecados de Sicilia han mantenido una vigilia muda durante mucho tiempo.

Pero ahora, siglos después, estos espeluznantes cadáveres tienen mucho que decir.

Cinco años después del Proyecto Momia de Sicilia, seis colecciones macabras ofrecen a los científicos una nueva mirada a la vida y la muerte en la isla mediterránea desde finales del siglo XVI hasta mediados del XX.

Dirigida por el antropólogo Dario Piombino-Mascali del Departamento de Patrimonio Cultural e Identidad Siciliana en Palermo (mapa), la investigación en curso está revelando cómo los hombres religiosos y sus seguidores adinerados comían, interactuaban, lidiaban con enfermedades y se deshacían de sus muertos.

“Estas momias son un tesoro único en términos de biología e historia”, dice Piombino-Mascali, quien también es becaria del National Geographic Expeditions Council. (National Geographic News es parte de la National Geographic Society). “Pueden decirnos mucho si se estudian adecuadamente”. (Vea imágenes de las momias de Sicilia de National Geographic).

En el caso de las momias sicilianas, eso significa exámenes de rayos X y tomografías computarizadas en lugar de muestreo invasivo y autopsia. Las técnicas radiográficas preservan los especímenes, el más antiguo de los cuales data de 1599, cuando los frailes capuchinos comenzaron a momificar al clero, luego a los nobles y burgueses que esperaban asegurar una vida futura bendecida, incluso cuando se asomaron al interior.

¿Y qué hay dentro?

For one thing, evidence of a good diet, says Piombino-Mascali, whose international team includes scientists from Germany, Brazil, and the United States. Since most of the mummies were well off in life, they ate a balanced mix of meat, fish, grains, vegetables, and dairy products.

But that gastronomic affluence came with a price. Radiographs of the bones also show signs of maladies like gout and skeletal disease, which Piombino-Mascali says “tended to afflict the middle and upper classes in preindustrial societies.”

And of course wealth couldn’t protect them from aging. More than two-thirds of these bodies show signs of degenerative disorders, says Piombino-Mascali—”probably because most were old adults when they died.” (From National Geographic magazine: Sicily’s mummies offer lessons about life.)

Spilling His Guts

As work continues apace in Sicily, which operates as an autonomous region of Italy, discoveries are coming from unlikely places.

Consider the studies performed by Karl Reinhard, a forensic scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He and his graduate students recently conducted a pilot program to see what they could glean just by examining intestines.

Their subject: “Piraino 1,” a male in his 40s who lived at the turn of the 19th century, one of 26 mummies in the Piraino Mother Church’s Sepulcher of the Priests in northeastern Sicily, which dates to the 16th century.

Radiology revealed that he had multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. But the real surprise came when Reinhard’s student Melissa Lein found evidence of milkwort, a pollen plant with antitumor agents used in China and Turkey but thought to be uncommon in Sicily.

“That indicates that people here had an esoteric knowledge of medicinal plants,” says Reinhard, whose team also found traces of grape pulp, a purgative with compounds effective in cancer treatment and cardiovascular disease. Based on the type of pulp, adds Reinhard, Piraino 1 likely died in the winter.

What’s more, Reinhard’s student Kelsey Kumm found an enormous whipworm infection—involving more than 600 worms—in the mummy’s intestinal tract. Kumm concluded that because the man had been sick with other diseases, his immune system was vulnerable to whipworm, a fecal-borne parasitic disease usually associated with poverty.