A well-preserved mummy identified as a government official from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912)—China’s last imperial dynasty before the creation of the Republic of China—has been unearthed from a construction site in Xiangcheng City in central China’s Henan Province. Though the Chinese did not deliberately preserve their dead as the ancient Egyptians did, environmental conditions have naturally preserved many centuries- and even millennia-old bodies there in remarkable condition, often with clothing, footwear, hair, and even skin intact.

After 3,000 years, the case that had held the mummy of Hor, a vizier’s son who died in tenth-century B.C. Thebes, was in a slump. It had succumbed to years of storage in moist conditions in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and was sagging badly at the chest and neck.

The casing is made of cartonnage, a rigid, millimeters-thick material made from layers of plaster and linen. To restore Hor’s shape, museum conservator Sophie Rowe teamed up with Dan Knowles, a 22-year-old Cambridge master’s student in engineering. Knowles constructed a special frame to suspend Hor facedown, and Rowe used an existing hole in its back to introduce moisture. After three weeks, Hor’s chest had re-expanded. Then the cartonnage needed to be held up from the inside.

“We considered inflatable systems and struts radiating from a central pole,” Rowe explained. Then Knowles came up with the idea of using Lego bricks. He fashioned supports that include a threaded screw system from a commercially available Lego set, adding archival foam where the toy bricks touch the ancient cartonnage.

The Lego supports are “an elegant solution,” says Rowe, noting that the hole in Hor’s back is small, so having a system that can be adjusted by feel is a plus. Hor is now on permanent display for museum visitors.

According to conventional wisdom, the ancestors of today’s Apache tribes migrated to the American Southwest sometime after the Spanish initially explored the area in the sixteenth century. But now archaeologist Deni J. Seymour of the Jornada Research Institute has dated previously overlooked storage platforms left by these nomadic people in rock shelters, and found that the people first arrived in the Southwest at least 200 years earlier than originally thought. Consisting of bases made of branches, surrounded by rocks and packed with grass or yucca leaves, these platforms were probably for long-term storage of hides filled with meat and nuts. The early dates of many of the platforms suggest that the people who became the Apache appeared in the region at the same time that communities of settled Pueblo farmers were wracked by violence. “Instead of thinking about the Southwest as a world of sedentary farmers, we should think about these Pueblo communities existing in a sea of nomadic peoples,” says Seymour.