Dig this

Forget the mummy's curse. The real power of ancient objects lies in their ability to piece together the past

Even people who know their Bible might have a hard time placing Medeba. Moses, Joshua and Isaiah mentioned it, and so did Ezra, identifying it as the place where the Ammonites' allies camped before fleeing from David's army.

Three millenia later, a University of Toronto doctoral candidate named Caroline Rocheleau spent two summer months at Madaba, as the Jordanian city is now known. Dressed in an old cotton T-shirt, cotton pants, wool socks and steel-toed boots, she would walk two miles with hoes, buckets and rubber baskets for a day of digging.

In the diary she kept there, she describes the careful measurements and record-keeping, and the removal of pottery shards that she would glue back together later. Piecing together the past is an exacting business.

Growing up in Kenya and visiting Egypt, Rocheleau knew early that she wanted to be an archaeologist. By the time she returned home to Canada to begin her college studies, the subject was far more tangible than just something she had read in textbooks.

"I realized I could do this for a 'living,' " said Rocheleau, who, as a curatorial research fellow at the N.C. Museum of Art, helped put together the new "Temples and Tombs: Treasures of Egyptian Art From the British Museum" for its Raleigh run. "And I put 'living' in quotes because it's hard to make one as an archaeologist."

A girl might dream about the glorious moments of discovery -- the tomb of King Tutankhamun, a Greek civilization that predated Homer, or the Madaba Map, a mosaic of the oldest known Holy Land map. But an archaeologist's fascination with ancient people runs deeper than that, sustaining interest in a field that extracts the big picture from small shards of culture.

Most people wouldn't commit to long, hot days sifting through layers of civilization. But they are more than willing to pay for the privilege of seeing ancient artifacts in museums. Before "The Treasures of Tutankhamun" toured the world in the 1970s, the word "blockbuster" wasn't in the museum vocabulary. Nearly 8 million Americans cued up to see the King Tut artifacts then.

Passion continues to run high. The five-city "Temples and Tombs" tour, which features 85 objects covering 3,000 years, overlaps with a new King Tut exhibit now in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, "The Past Is Present: Classical Antiquities at the Nasher Museum" is a yearlong display of ancient objects from the Mediterranean that were given to the museum last year. And "Fashioning the Divine: South Asian Sculpture at the Ackland Art Museum" drew from the UNC-Chapel Hill museum's collection.

Rocheleau and her fellow experts see the interest in pop culture as well, with "The Da Vinci Code" selling 60.5 million copies, the recent "Lost Tomb of Jesus" documentary stirring up attention, and the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel and PBS making history ever more accessible. But the museum exhibitions allow an even closer look.

At the N.C. Museum of Art, "Temples and Tombs" is organized around four themes -- the king's power, artifacts from daily life, statues of nonroyalty and the afterlife. Visitors won't find that most cliched image of ancient Egypt -- the mummy; instead they will detect an emphasis on artistry, particularly in the surprising variety of statuary.

But as impressive as grander items may be -- the red granite "Lion of Amenhotep III" and the ebony and sycamore "Striding Figure of Meryrahashtef" -- such commonplace gewgaws as cosmetic implements and jewelry hold their own fasincation.

Rocheleau underlines the obvious in explaining why.