Background:

By the time you have gotten to this assignment, you should have taken the "grand tour" of the Virtual Experience site about King Tut. On my first tour, when the entire project was quite new, I was taken by the South Wall of the young king's tomb. It was an immersive moment; I felt that I was as close to the actual site in Egypt as I'd ever get.

Anubis (on L in image) and Hathor (on R) greet Tut as he enters the other world, but Howard Carter had to destroy a figure of the goddess Isis as he and this team made their way into the tomb. This struck me as a tragedy that might have been avoided.

Of course, Carter was using 1922 technology. Don't you think you could do better?

Your Goals:

• First you must locate Tut's tomb itself. Heritage Key does not yet support landmarks (yet), but if you wander about you will find an area called The Valley of the Kings.
• There are teleportation portals all over the Heritage Key virtual world. One way to find the tomb is a direct teleport to the Valley.
• Another way is to locate the Start Area, follow the "stargate" teleporter to the Valley of the Kings welcome area (be sure to go to the travel shop there) then teleport again to the map area with the balloon ride. It's worth it. You'll end up at the "dig" site where you'll find several tombs.

Once you arrive, take time to explore the area in detail. Then your team should:

• Conduct research, online and in our library, to come up with a solution to this problem: remove the contents of the burial chamber without destroying the murals on any of the walls. "We'd dig a hole straight down and under" won't cut it. Each writer in the group should note, in detail, what his or her contribution to the research and solution have been.
• You need to research the actual site, consider it during a visit to Heritage Key's simulation, study the artifacts that would have to be moved without damage, then devise a solution.

I will ask Jon Himoff of Rezzable, as well as a panel of readers, to vote on the most clever solution with commentary on your wiki posts.

Each individual writer's project must:

• Be at least 1000 words long
• State your role in the team: what sources you found, what share of the work you undertook, what sources you found for the group but that did not work out, which ideas you proposed, and more. It's possible for a group to have a person who tackles issues of building materials, one who reads as much about Carter's dig as possible, and a third who finds the measurements of the artifacts recovered by Carter.
• Include source citations in MLA format with a Works-Cited List at the end. Your group members may share sources. I expect at least three sources for each group.
• The number of sources are up to you...but in this case, divide the tasks and "more will be better." You can draw from research in many fields, such as history, geology, and archeology, to come up with a clever plan.

"Look at all these cool things! Which one will I put in my UR office?"

Starting your Research:

• Our Course Guide by Dr. Whitehead
• Wikipedia entries on Howard Carter and Tutankhamun
• Boatwright Library's (UR access only) link to the NY Times archive
• UR's Classical Studies and Anthropology Research Guides
• Archeology Magazine online
• The broader Heritage Key site (their Web site for all sorts of wonders from the Ancient World).