Beautiful burials, beautiful skulls: The aesthetics of the Egyptian mummy

This article uses Egyptian burials of the Roman period as an entry point for considering aesthetics in relation to archaeology, ancient art, and human remains. Although some archaeologists and Egyptologists reject or ignore the concept of aesthetics, this article argues that it complements questions of ontology, materiality, and social practice that concern much contemporary archaeological thought. Moreover, engaging with aesthetics in the study of the ancient world requires archaeologists (and others) to reflect critically on the relationship between disciplinary histories and knowledge production, and to recognize the influence that earlier aesthetic models, such as racial science, continue to exert in current aesthetic encounters with ancient Egypt and its dead.