It was built at the start of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, that of the Kushite pharaohs from Nubia. Its original owner was Nisemro, a high official of Nubian origin active in Thebes at that time. The facade had mudbrick pylons nearly seventeen metres long.
The study published on 18 August in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology is not about the tomb as a whole. It is about one room: Side Chamber 3, five metres ten by three metres fifteen. The authors are Jared Carballo-Pérez, of the Laboratory of Osteoarchaeology at Leiden University, and Miguel Ángel Molinero Polo, of the University of La Laguna, who directs the excavation project.
That chamber has a rare quality: it was never touched. The early twentieth-century explorations that emptied and reshuffled almost everything at Thebes never reached it. Which means the sequence of burials survived exactly as it was left.

Inside were 1,444 bones belonging to sixteen human individuals still in the position in which they had been laid, or nearly so, and one mummified canid. Plus a separate secondary deposit of 1,775 burnt fragments, corresponding to at least four more people.
The discipline that studies such contexts is called archaeothanatology. It does not simply count skeletons: it looks at how bodies are arranged, which joints remained articulated, what rests on what, where the objects lay. From that you reconstruct what happened, and in what order.
The result reads like a change of rules over three centuries.

In the earliest phases, those of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, each of the dead has their own. Their own wooden coffin, their own space in the chamber, their own objects. Two men in the eastern sector, two women in the south-western one, with a clear area between. The authors note the separation by sex but caution against turning it into a rule: four people are too few to establish a custom.
Then the arrangement begins to give way. Towards the end of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty newcomers are inserted wherever there is room, even where the room is already taken. In the Persian phase this intensifies: coffin number 6 is set on top of coffin number 7, which still holds its occupant. A woman between seventeen and twenty is laid directly over a man of more than sixty, with no coffin.
By the Ptolemaic period the coffin has vanished entirely. The last individuals are laid on those below, or wedged between limestone blocks, or with the skull resting on a potsherd. Of nine burial groups, at least six show direct vertical superposition.

This is where the dog appears, and it deserves cutting down to size, because in this week’s coverage it has become the protagonist. In the paper it is one line in a table. It is a female canid, labelled M9, with limbs flexed, oriented west, laid over the legs of two people: a woman between twenty-five and thirty-five and a man between thirty-five and forty-five, both from the Persian phase. No associated object was documented. The authors offer no hypothesis about why it was there. That is not the question their study asks.
Their question is a different one, and it concerns what that change means. The traditional reading is economic: space ran short, money for new tombs ran short, and so bodies were piled up. The authors propose another reading.

The shift from individual burials to an accumulative system, they argue, does not indicate a loss of funerary order but a change of logic. In the early phase the element that structures the burial is the coffin: it delimits the body, holds its position, gathers the objects, defines a closed unit. In the late phase that role passes to the chamber itself, that is to the topography of the bodies already present, the sediment surfaces and the architectural constraints. The coffin does not disappear out of poverty: it loses its role in organising the space, and that role passes to something else.
One technical detail supports this reading and is of the kind worth admiring. The authors warn that the present vertical position of the mummies is not the original one. Coffins, wrappings and soft tissue compressed and collapsed, letting the bodies sink. At the moment of later depositions, then, the earlier dead were probably more visible and more prominent than they now appear. Those who came later could see them.
The gestures of the body show a movement too. In the early phases hands resting on the pelvis predominate. In the late ones arms crossed over the chest predominate, the posture iconography associates with Osiris. The authors record the pattern but hold back on interpretation: it is one element within a wider set of changes in the preparation of the body, not proof of a single process of Osirianisation.

The chamber was not only filled. It was also broken into and transformed. An intrusive cut, catalogued as stratigraphic unit 716, runs through the body of one of the oldest mummies and severs its lower half: someone came back in and dug there, much later.
And there is the burnt deposit, which remains the darkest point. One thousand seven hundred and seventy-five bone fragments, at least four people, three adults and one adolescent. Some 88.6 per cent show thermal alteration, and around 36 per cent approach calcination. The macroscopic characteristics indicate temperatures near 550 degrees under largely oxygen-poor conditions. The fire affected skulls and lower limbs above all.
Where those remains came from, the authors write that they do not know. They may come from an earlier phase of the same chamber, or have been brought there from another part of the tomb. Some of the fragments were later redistributed into an upper layer, which complicates the reconstruction further.
The objects tell the same arc as the bodies. In the early phases they are in primary position, in direct contact with the dead: Phoenician amphorae, incense cups, scarabs, Sons of Horus amulets, tubular faience beads, some found inside the wrappings or in body cavities. In the late phases many materials are scattered through the sediment, and it is no longer possible to say to whom they belonged.

The limitations remain, and the authors set them out without softening. Floods, sediment transport, fire, later re-entries and reconfigurations make it hard to distinguish original relationships from subsequent alterations. Preservation is uneven. Some interpretations, particularly those about the mechanisms of reuse and the original position of the burnt deposit, should be considered provisional. And even the word memory, which appears in the text, is used in a material sense: the physical persistence of bodies and objects, not a conscious act of remembrance by those doing the burying.
Two notes on transparency, which the authors declare. The handling editor disclosed a previous scientific collaboration with one of the two signatories. And the researchers state that they used ChatGPT for language editing and structuring of the manuscript, specifying that every output was checked and corrected and that they take full responsibility for the content.

The excavation, finally, was funded by the government of the Canary Islands, the Palarq Foundation, the University of La Laguna, the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Spanish Association of Egyptology. Plus a crowdfunding campaign among private donors and a contribution from a furniture company. In the acknowledgements the authors thank first the Egyptian workmen, without whom, they write, the research would not have been possible.

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References
Carballo-Pérez J., Molinero Polo M.Á., "From individualized mummies to collective accumulations: an archaeothanatological analysis of funerary reuse in Theban Tomb 209 (Twenty-Fifth Dynasty-Ptolemaic Egypt)", Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, vol. 5, article 1888379, published 18 August 2026, open access under CC BY. doi: 10.3389/fearc.2026.1888379
Carballo-Pérez J., Molinero Polo M.Á., "Mummies under the wadi. Preliminary study of a burial deposit in Theban Tomb 209 (South Asasif, Egypt)", Canarias Arqueológica, 22, 615-628, 2021.
Duday H., "The Archaeology of the Dead: Lectures in Archaeothanatology", Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2009, on the archaeothanatological method.