When Roy van Beek was a teenager in
the Netherlands in the early 1990s, he made a field trip to a local museum to
see an exhibit of bog bodies: ancient human remains, both skeletal and
naturally mummified, interred in the wetlands and spongy turf of northern
Europe.
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He recalled one cadaver on display that was
remarkably intact and oddly disorienting. The contorted body of a female about
his age, roughly 135cm tall, who had lived in the first century AD. “She had
been left in a shallow mire south of the modern-day village of Yde,” said van
Beek, now an archaeologist at Wageningen University & Research. Her skin
had been tanned in the dark tea of the bog.
The Yde Girl, as she became known, was
unearthed in 1897 by peat diggers so spooked by their gruesome discovery that
they reportedly chorused “I hope the Devil gets the man that dug this hole” and
fled the scene. The corpse was wearing a much-darned woolen cloak, which
concealed a stab wound near her collarbone. A 2-meter-long strip of cloth,
perhaps a waistband, was wound around her neck three times and its slipknot indented
below her left ear.
The raised bog of Abbeyleix, Ireland, one
of the sites included in the recent study of bog bodies.
“The cloth was probably used to strangle
her,” van Beek said. Most of the bog mummies that have turned up also show
signs of multiple traumatic injuries and are presumed to be murder victims.
Last month, van Beek was the lead author of
the first comprehensive survey of bog bodies — a burial tradition believed to
span 7,000 years. The multidisciplinary study, published in the journal
Antiquity, created a database of more than 1,000 such bog people, some
arrestingly lifelike, from 266 historical bog sites across a swath of northern
Europe, from Ireland to the Baltic States.
Relying on recorded folklore, descriptions
and depictions, newspaper reports, and antiquarian records, a team of Dutch,
Swedish, and Estonian researchers focused on the rise of bog burials starting
around 5200 BC, in the Neolithic period and into the Bronze Age. The team took
particular interest in the tradition’s efflorescence from 1000 BC to 1500 AD,
from the Iron Age to the medieval period.
“While a number of bog scholars have been
arguing that we need to reconceptualize bog bodies to include the skeletonized
remains from more alkaline bog lands and wetlands, this is the first major
study to do it systematically,” Melanie Giles, a British archaeologist not involved
in the study, said in an email. “The results are really quite important,
showing a formal burial phase in the Bronze Age and a rise in violent deaths
during the time in which these bogs, within certain hot spots, grow
exponentially.”
Bog-mummified people are mainly found in raised bogs — discrete, dome-shaped masses of peat that typically form in lowland landscapes and reach depths of 9m or more.
Cases are divided into three main
categories: bog mummies, whose skin, soft tissue, and hair are preserved; bog
skeletons, with only the bones surviving; and a third group composed of the
partial remains of both. “Many finds have been lost in the distant past or are
only known through published sources,” van Beek said. “These ‘paper’ bog bodies
are documented with varying degrees of detail and reliability.” Before the 19th
century, bodies pulled out of bogs were often given a Christian reburial.
The cadavers owe their state to the natural
chemistry of bogs. Layers of sphagnum moss and peat help pickle bodies by
saturating the tissue in a cold, immobilizing environment that is highly acidic
and almost devoid of oxygen. The decaying mosses release humic acids and sphagnan,
a complex sugar, that make life difficult for the microorganisms that would
normally cause rotting and decay. Sphagnan also leaches calcium from bones,
eventually softening, breaking, and warping them.
‘A dark elderberry place’Bog-mummified people are mainly found in
raised bogs — discrete, dome-shaped masses of peat that typically form in
lowland landscapes and reach depths of 9m or more. (Blanket bogs are generally
shallower and spread out widely over wet or upland areas.)
The first recorded body emerged from
Schalkholz Fen in Holstein, Germany, in 1640. Since then, the cold-weather
swamps of northern Europe have yielded such regional curiosities as Windeby
Girl, Haraldskjaer Woman, Lindow Man, Clonycavan Man, Old Croghan Man and
Koelbjerg Man. The bones of Koelbjerg Man, recovered in 1941 on the Danish
island of Funen, date to 8000 BC. Seamus Heaney’s melancholy “Bog Poems”
include a lament for Grauballe Man, whose throat was slit in the third century
BC:
The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place.
A fundamental question about these Iron Age victims is why. Were they murdered? Executed? Sacrificed to the gods, perhaps as fertility offerings?
Of the 57 bog people whose cause of death
could be determined in van Beek’s study, at least 45 met violent ends, and
quite a few were bludgeoned or suffered mutilation and dismemberment before
they died. Tollund Man, dating to the fifth century BC and dredged from a
Danish peat bog in 1950, was hanged. Bone arrowheads were found embedded in the
skull and sternum of Porsmose Man, recovered from peat elsewhere in Denmark.
Seven victims appear to have been slain by several means, a practice that
scholars call overkilling. Almost all of the overkills in van Beek’s study
occurred from 400 BC to 400 AD.
The bog of warWhile most sites held just a single
deceased person, some were used repeatedly, with one Danish bog, Alken Enge,
estimated to hold the disarticulated remains of more than 380 ancient warriors
killed in a brutal conflict and left in open water. The bones, exclusively male
and predominantly adult, date to early in the first century AD, when Germanic
tribes engaged in intratribal warfare. Researchers believe that the dead were
cleared from the battlefield and dumped into the bog with their weapons and
personal ornaments.
This would have been one of the lesser
indignities that befell bog people. Many were hastily extracted or improperly conserved;
in the Netherlands of the late 18th century, four bog corpses were even ground
into mumia — mummy powder — and sold as remedies.
A fundamental question about these Iron Age
victims is why. Were they murdered? Executed? Sacrificed to the gods, perhaps
as fertility offerings? Miranda Aldhouse-Green, emeritus professor of
archaeology at Cardiff University and author of “Bog Bodies Uncovered”, has
argued that ritual sacrifices may have been undertaken at times of crisis in a
community: famine, extreme weather, war threats, the perceived need to kill
foreign hostages.
Two features recur among Iron Age bog
bodies: youth and disability. Many bodies were those of adolescents, at the
cusp between childhood and adulthood. “In some traditional societies, such
individuals were perceived to have shamanic powers, enabling them to segue
between the material and spirit worlds, just as people at puberty contain
elements of childhood and adulthood,” Aldhouse-Green said in an email.
For peat’s sakeThe growth of bog lands was stimulated more
than 10,000 years ago by the collapse of the Eurasian Ice Sheet and release of
freshwater, which abruptly raised sea levels and groundwater tables. Plant
decomposition is slowed to such an extent in these areas that dead vegetation
accumulates to form peat, effectively storing carbon dioxide. As a result,
preserving bog lands is considered a powerful tool to help mitigate climate
change.
“Many bogs across Europe are currently protected nature reserves, often with attempts to restore and expand them.”
“Many bogs across Europe are currently
protected nature reserves, often with attempts to restore and expand them,” van
Beek said. He added, with chagrin, that in the Irish Midlands, the Baltic
States and parts of Germany, peat is still being cut.
“Never before have we needed to care as
much about peatlands,” said Giles, whose book “Bog Bodies: Face to Face With
the Past” explores what she calls “the black hole of the peat pool”. “Yet for
hundreds of years we’ve told awful tales about these maligned landscapes,
encouraging people to steer clear, to drain and damage those precious places.”
Yde Girl and Tollund Man are reminders that
humans once had very different and more respectful relationships with the bog,
she said: “Bog bodies — and artifacts and eco-facts — become strange kinds of
ambassadors from deep time. They re-enchant us with these landscapes through
their stories.”
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