Anthropologist Reinhard gives a first-person account of the 1995 discovery he made with his assistant, Miguel Zárate, while climbing an inactive volcano high in the Andes mountains. Amazingly, a frozen mummy bundle lay right out in the open near the summit! It had been dislodged a few days earlier from the rock in which it had been buried for over 500 years. The challenges Reinhard and Zárate faced just getting the mummy off the mountain before it was destroyed by exposure are described step-by-step, as are the details of the scientific exploration that followed. Crisp color photographs of the events as they unfolded make readers feel as though they are on-site at the excavation and subsequent laboratory study of a mummy that provided researchers with plenty of evidence about Incan life prior to European contact. John Reinhard is one of the scientists interviewed in Pat Cummings' Talking with Adventurers (see earlier entry in this section). (Ages 9-14)