Thursday, July 27, 2006

"I'm having very little fun" A Mystery Fit For A Pharaoh
Nervous about bumping into someone—or worse, something—I make my way back out to the narrow shaft and climb to the surface with Otto Schaden, the dig's director. Until this past February, he had worked in obscurity, splitting his time between studying a minor Pharaoh's tomb nearby and playing bass fluegelhorn in a Chicago band. Back up amid the heat and tourists, the 68-year-old archaeologist pulls out tobacco and bread crumbs, thrusting the first into a pipe and flinging the second onto the ground for some twittering finches. Just yards away, visitors in shorts and hats are lining up to get into King Tut's cramped tomb, named KV-62 because it was the 62nd tomb found in the Valley of the Kings.


Nice long article on KV-63. Gives more history on what Otto'd been doing in the past and more of a timeline for the discovery of KV-63. I didn't know there was any controversy about it amongst his "colleagues", though it does sort of paint Otto the way I know him: fairly quiet and methodical.