One talented Ohio State University student is showing that archeology involves more than dusty tombs and fedora-wearing professors, and her work is now being featured in a new history exhibition.

Alexandra Keenan-Krilevich regards its forehead and temples and then begins to roll a ball of brown clay, measuring its thickness with a caliper, slicing it just so.

She lays a few strips of clay across the skull’s cap. Then she rolls another ball, measures, rolls again, slices.

It’s tedious work, building a face.

Keenan-Krilevich won’t rush. She’s content to lay down pieces of clay until the former owner of the skull, a woman who died more than 2,000 years ago, reveals herself. Only then will she know what Amunet looked like.

“It’s really up to the skull itself,” says Keenan-Krilevich, an Ohio State University student and certified forensic facial reconstructionist. “You follow what the bones tell you.”

Keenan-Krilevich’s work is the latest effort to bring the Ohio Historical Society’s mummy to life.

Last year, OSU Wexner Medical Center volunteers ran the mummy, a long-standing and popular exhibit at the Ohio History Center, through a CT scanner, revealing thousands of digital images of the body beneath the bandages.

Historical society curators saw their mummy in a way they’d never seen her before and also learned, in an unrelated revelation, that she was in the wrong coffin. They stopped calling her Nesykhonsupashery, whom she was previously believed to be, and renamed her Amunet, meaning “hidden one.”

And they decided to give Amunet a new exhibit.

“We’re able to tell more of her story instead of the other woman’s,” said Linda Pansing, an archaeology curator for the historical society.

On Sept. 11, “Transformation” is to open at the Ohio History Center, an exhibit that will include a Miss America dress, a vaudeville makeup kit, a piece of hanging rope and a passenger pigeon.

Amunet will be “Transformation’s” centerpiece, showing her change from unknown mummy to woman who once lived. Visitors will see Amunet’s CT scans, a three-dimensional representation of her skull and Keenan-Krilevich’s sculpture of her head.