MUNISS (Museo Scientifico Università di Sassari) – Collezione Anatomica «Luigi Rolando»

Within the museum there are two Chancay mummies, an adult male aged 25–30 years and a subadult of about six months. Various hypotheses have been put forward concerning the history of the collection: a donation by a member of the House of Savoy to the University; a gift made as a token of gratitude for the hospitality received by a Peruvian explorer; the donation by an officer from Sassari on his return from a journey to Peru; or, most plausibly, that they arrived through the same channel that brought to Italy most of the Peruvian and Chancay mummies preserved in the country, namely Paolo Mantegazza and Ernesto Mazzei, physicians and explorers who, upon their return from travels in South America, brought back to Italy artifacts of every kind. The lack of historical documentation can therefore be attributed either to the loss of documents relating to the two mummies during the various moves of the former Istituto di Anatomia umana normale and later of the Dipartimento di Scienze Biomediche, or to the fact that, during the intense traffic generated by nineteenth-century explorations, artifacts were not accompanied by documentation specifying their precise geographical origin, dating, and population of provenance.