It seems as only yesterday the crab-eating vixen passed from among the living, but not from the world. The knowledgeable among her kind prepared her body according to the most sophisticated procedures. Her bones which time would so easily scatter were reinforced and joined together inseparably. The organs which were vital to the living but which only betrayed the dead were removed to benefit the needing. The fragile flesh was stripped from her and superior substitutes grafted in its place. Her coat was sealed with a shell of protective compounds. And so prepared, transformed to endure going where the living could not, she was launched on her journey into eternity.

In seven thousand years the vixen emerges once more from Chilean soil. Still and mute, blind and deaf, as unthinking as the day she went into the earth. But intact, as her modified body has promised. On a bed of sand in a museum cabinet, the slow but steady journey across the merciless gulf of time continues.
The strangers who inhabit the land - perhaps her own descendants among them? - look at her and wonder. They marvel at the primitive craftsmanship of forebears from whom they expect nothing. They pity her misfortune of having lived and died in an age without understanding, bound by ridiculous superstitions. All while their contemporaries dream of hiding from death in liquid nitrogen, or remaking their bodies to endure a journey to the stars.

From the sketchbook. Ink, coloured pencils and mixed liners.

There is some artistic license here: Crab-eating foxes are not actually found in the ancient Chinchorro homeland, but selected the species because the preferred diet matched that of the Chinchorro (in all aspects but one, which we will get to), and because it is not particularly well known.

The Chinchorro method of mummification is the oldest method of funerary preservation known, preceeding the oldest Egyptian mummies by over 3000 years. Mummification began with the flaying of the body and the removal of muscles and inner organs, including the brain. The caps of the long bones were broken and the marrow extracted, before the skeleton was reassembled and fitted together with a wooden frame. Flesh was replaced with dry plant matter, and the tanned skin was re-sewed. The body was sealed with a protective compound which varied over time, ranging from unfired clay to a sort of varnish, the outside of which head hair (and in this case the coat of the brush) was attached to. Finally the face and breast were fitted with ornamental clay coverings.

Why the Chinchorro developed this elaborate practice is not fully understood today. Some of the recovered mummies show wear and tear from being carried and displayed, suggesting the dead remained a part of everyday life after their passing - there are parallels in a number of other cultures practicing primitive mummification. More remarkably the Chinchorro practiced funerary cannibalism, and mummification may have developed as a means to ritually restore defleshed bodies.

Something I consider when it comes to what we can learn from mummies is that ideas of transhumanism are not in any way new. The idea of modifying the human body, enabling existence in hostile environments, and possibly becoming something other than human in the process, has existed as long as has civilization. For example, from an ancient Egyptian perspective their elaborate tombs were not tombs, but no-nonsense machines built to facilitate travel to a physical afterlife; the mummification a process to prepare the pharao for the launch to Orion.
Today our cumulative knowledge is immeasurably greater and our understanding of the cosmos vastly more exact. We put our hopes in cybernetics and genetic engineering. Still we would do well to remember our dreams are not much different from those of our ancestors - and just as them, we have only our current understanding of the world and the current limit of our technology to trust in.