Solving the mysteries of Palermo’s child mummies
The first ever comprehensive study of mummified children in Sicily’s famous Capuchin Catacombs is being led by Staffordshire University.Dr Kirsty Squires, Associate Professor of Bioarchaeology, and her team have been given exclusive access to a previously unstudied collection of children’s mummies housed in the underground cemetery of the Capuchin Convent in Palermo.
The Catacombs contain the largest collection of mummies in Europe, with over 1,284 mummified and skeletonised bodies dating from the late sixteenth to early twentieth century. Children were accepted in the Catacombs from