Tracking Nefertiti

Egyptology is part art, part science. Earning and keeping one's professional reputation can be a squirrelly business, necessitating reliance on a careful balance of dry data and brilliant intuition. Despite having done 12 years of homework before assembling a team of renowned experts to go into the tomb with her — some wielding delicate brushes and others, the latest in digital X-ray technology — Fletcher has met with a healthy amount of naysaying.

"Somebody like myself," Fletcher concedes, "tends to attract as much negative attention as possible. I tend not to approach things in the most orthodox manner. Say the stereotypical thing and don't express too much emotion, or it might look like you're enjoying yourself, God forbid!"

Naysayers notwithstanding, clearly it's Fletcher's moment in the sun.

"It is all superlatives," she enthuses: "so amazing, so fantastic, so intense. I'm still dreaming about it. It was the high point of a career that has been an intense one. I'll never be able to replicate that again, even if I study mummies for the next 50 years."

The mummy formerly known as "the Younger Woman" (Nefertiti) lies in close proximity to her two tomb mates. All were stripped of most of their wrappings in ancient times and, therefore, the identities that likely would have been written on them. A shaved head is only one of the things that sets Nefertiti apart from "the Elder Woman" (Queen Tiye) with her luxuriant red tresses and exquisitely manicured nails, and also from "the Boy" with his characteristically flowing "side lock of youth."

Nefertiti's face is mutilated; her mouth savagely hacked away. Her right arm has been torn off just below the shoulder. The chest has a gaping hole in it. These are only the most visible of the atrocities. There are others, some of which are just now coming to light with the careful analyses of the bodies and recent digital X-rays of them.

"We're all absolutely knocked out by the detail we were allowed to study on the bodies," says Fletcher, who, with the rest of the team, scrutinized the skin for evidence of wounds or disease and looked at the brow for the impression of a band. "I was talking to the radiographer at King's College Hospital in London who's studying the X-ray images in depth. They've noticed something very peculiar about the way in which the feet of all three have been treated. It has so many ramifications."