Is it a fact that Howard Carter had to take King Tut's body out piece by piece?
   Samantha, Springfield, IL

Dr. dig responds:
Yes, unfortunately, it is true. The undertakers who put Tutankhamen's mummy into its golden coffin, covered the body with a sticky perfumed resin, which set hard over time and glued the king in place. Howard Carter first heated the coffin in order to melt the glue as much as possible. The anatomist Douglas Derry then unwrapped the king, still in his coffin, and extracted his skeleton a section at a time. The golden mask had to be removed with hot knives, and Tutankhamun ended up in pieces. It is easy to be critical of this method of excavation‹certainly no modern Egyptologist would employ such brutal methods‹but we should remember that Carter was working before the advent of scientific archaeology, and he had few resources at his disposal.