"Whatever we do will be symbolic, because it is impossible to put together a precise accounting," a senior American official said last week.

Last year, Dr. Hawass decided that a more precise accounting was needed, so he sent in a team of curators to do a complete inventory.

A precise and reliable accounting of what happened has been absent until now.

Many people booked on the flight missed it because of winter storms in United States, so a precise accounting is proving difficult, he said.

(Mexico's disclosure laws prevent a more precise accounting.)

There will never be a precise accounting of how many Rwandans were massacred between April and July 1994.

Neither the Army nor the Navy would provide a precise accounting of all of the cases now regarded as confirmed or suspected homicide.

Starting Sunday, the museum will display the noggin - top united with bottom - in an exhibit that will also include a precise accounting of its travels.

There is as yet no precise accounting of how many Rumanians were adversely affected by such strictures.

A precise accounting is all but impossible because, medical authorities say, victims were buried before the cause was known, and poor patients might not have seen doctors.