I second (or is it now third) the motion to xray the "beggers"  I once did
this with a pile of rusty stuff by taking it to a local veterinarian who
usually exrayed boring things like horses and cows hoofs.  He also had a
mobil unit and could have come to the lab or site to help us out.  We set a
couple dozen lumps on the frame and shot only a few frames and paid him for
his cost (the curiosity factor kept his fee out of it).  As for the rusty
lumps, most turned out to be rusty lumps with no visible form, which was
proven when we sacrificed several of them.  We ended up relying on th eform
of the lump to make an assessment, but we saved untold thousands in
professional conservation costs.

Another local vet also processed a series of mummy x rays that we did in
our local library.  We had Gerald Conlogue from Quinnipiac College's
Bioanthropology Research Institute come to Cazenovia with their "portable"
x ray unit (left over from WWII).  In a matter of a few hours we found that
the mummy was of a young adult female and not an old lady as the expensive
CT Scans had shown.

here's some of their other projects:
http://www.yale.edu/opa/v27.n34/story3.html
http://www.fujimed.com/news/news_mummy.html



All that talk about rust gets me wondering about the different types of
irons and steels and the degree of rust they will form - some iron objects
we found that project had no rust but others (apparently nails) had
completely disintegrated in the same deposit  - does anyone know?

        Dan W.