2010’s well underway now, and with it the new decade. At Heritage Key we’ve begun the teenies by asking a cross-section of heritage experts to get their crystal balls out, in a bid to try and predict what they think (or at least hope) will be the big discoveries, themes, advances and breakthroughs in their individual fields – and in archaeology and heritage studies at large – over the next ten years.
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"Ten years ago only birds tweeted, then Stephen Fry started and now even museum staff are doing it."
Bob “Mr Mummy” Brier is an American Egyptologist and the world’s leading authority on mummies. He’s a familiar face from documentaries on channels such as National Geographic and Discovery Civilizations, and has investigated some of the most famous embalmed corpses in history, including Tutankhamun, Ramesses the Great, the Medici (a powerful ruling dynasty of the Republic of Florence) and Eva Perón. In 1994, he carried out the first mummification in 2,000 years achieved exclusively by use of Egyptian tools and techniques.
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"It wasn’t just, you know: 'let’s mummify!' We asked: 'how do you take the brain out through the nose?' and 'can you take a liver out of a three and half centimetre incision in the abdomen?'"
"My invitation to Dr Hawass to lead a simple survey with non-destructive techniques is still on the table. That survey could be his last and most remarkable discovery while at the head of the SCA." -- Jean-Pierre Houdin
We know lots about the Great Pyramid of Giza – it’s age (about 4,569 years), who it was built for (the Fourth Dynasty Egyptian King Khufu), who designed it (Khufu’s brother, the architect Hemienu) and even who rolled up their sleeves and did the work (tens of thousands of skilled labourers from across the kingdom, as opposed to slaves as was once believed). But ask a room full of experts how it was built, and you can expect a whole lot of head-scratching and beard-stroking, followed by heated argument and possibly some light fisticuffs.
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“A green light from Cairo and the Great Pyramid mystery is over,” -- Jean Pierre Houdin
Jean-Pierre Houdin is a French architect best known for propogating a particular theory about the construction of the Egyptian pyramids - basically that they were built from the inside out - that many believe will soon be proven true.
He was born in Paris, France in 1951, and raised in Abidjan, Africa, where his father worked as a civil engineer. He studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then after graduation set up as an independent architect in 1976. It was his father who, in 1999, first began to develop the idea that the pyramids were constructed internally rather than externally, using ramps. Houdin joined his father in attempting to prove this theory, using his expertise in architecture and 3D graphics.
Research at the Great Pyramid of Giza - which has turned up one of the corner notches that they hypothesised was used for turning stone blocks - has thus far appeared to prove their theory, although some experts still write it off as being over-complex. It is hoped that new research in the next year or two, using infrared photography of the pyramid cooling in the evening, will turn up irrefutable evidence of an internal spiral ramp that was used to raise the stone blocks.
Bob “Mr Mummy” Brier
The question of how the 
We know lots about the 
