Archaelogists from Brigham Young University have been working on a massive Egyptian cemetery called Fag el-Gamous, which means "Way of the Water Buffalo" a title taken from a nearby road. While they have been working on the project for 30 years, new discoveries have recently attracted the attention of the scientific community.

"We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It's large, and it's dense," project director Kerry Muhlestein said while presenting his findings to the Society For Study of Egyptian Antiquities Scholars Colloquium in Toronto last month, according to Live Science.

The cemetary is proving something of a mystery, as there is no settlement nearby to sustain or require such a massive burial site. Most of the dead were placed there between the 1st and 7th century AD, 1,500 years ago during the Roman and Byzantine occupations of Egypt.

The cemetary is filled not with royal mummies of popular imagination, but common people. The people buried here were often laid to rest without grave goods, coffins, or organ removal typical of the more lavish tombs many have come to expect. It was in fact the arid natural environment that mummified them, not the ritualistic process used for kings.

 "I don't think you would term what happens to these burials as true mummification," Muhlestein said. "If we want to use the term loosely, then they were mummified."

"A lot of their wealth, as little as they had, was poured into these burials," Muhlestein said.

The recent discovery of a mummified chiled was recently discovered among the graves, it was wrapped in a tunic and wore a necklace with two bracelets on each arm.

"There was some evidence that they tried much of the full mummification process. The toes and toenails and brain and tongue were amazingly preserved," the researchers wrote on the project's Facebook page. "The jewelry makes us think it was a girl, but we cannot tell."

Researchers estimate the infant was 18 months old when she died. "She was buried with great care, as someone who obviously loved her very much did all they could to take care of this little girl in burial," the researchers wrote. It's "very sad, but they succeeded. It was a beautiful burial."

Archaeologists found that blond and redhead people tended to be clustered in the cemetery. These clusters are suggest "perhaps we have family areas or genetic groups [in certain areas], but we're still trying to explore that," Muhlestein said

Some scholars disagree with the findings of the Brigahm Young "There's no way that cemetery has a million mummies, there are maximum a few thousand," said Yousef Khalifa, chairman of the Egyptian antiquities sector.

"Even if the cemetery is huge, it would take the bodies to be buried over each other and upon each other to fit in the space," said Khalifa. "Only one mummy was found in that cemetery in 1980, and the rest are just remains of old dead bodies."

The ongoing mystery of where all these mummies, or desicated bodies rather, came from has not been solved and will be the focus of the Brigham Young team moving forward.