The find dates to the Early Iron Age. How did the Huldremose woman die? Was it murder? Aldhouse-Green writes that these restraints may have been a way of taming the dead, pinning their ghosts to the spot where they died.
Several bodies also show signs of having undergone ritual humiliation. Most were buried naked, or wrapped only in a shroud. The Windeby Girl had the left side of her head shaved. Likewise, the placement in bodies the bogs suggests that they were not ordinary burials. Cremation was the most common form of internment in Iron Age northern Europe, while higher status individuals were sometimes placed in oak caskets and buried with grave goods for use in the next world.
The bog bodies had neither. But does that necessarily mean that they were sacrificed? Aldhouse-Green presents two main strands of evidence to argue that it does. One comes from classical antiquity. Several Roman historians, including Strabo, Tacitus, and Julius Caesar, described versions of human sacrifice being practiced by the peoples of northern Europe.
Sometimes it was a means of telling the future, and at other times it was done as part of a cult associated with a particular god or temple. The other strand comes from archaeology of the British Isles, where there are many examples of bodies that seem to have been buried alive, human remains used as foundation deposits for houses, and burials in which attendants were interred with their chiefs. There are even signs that bodies may, in certain places, have been pulled out of the bogs and kept on display hundreds of years after their deaths.
Bogs themselves seem to have been places of special reverence. In Germany and Denmark, weapons, wagons, food, images of gods, and even whole ships were deliberately left in their waters. These were most likely as ceremonial offerings, and as Aldhouse-Green points out, in societies where slavery was common, a human being might have been worth less than a valuable sword or cauldron. Both strands of evidence suffer from certain deficiencies. Aldhouse-Green emphasizes that the classical historians have to be treated with caution.
They were, after all, writing as outsiders to the cultures they were describing, and each brought their own agenda to bear on the customs of the barbarian north. But there are some boggy places with relatively alkaline — or "basic" — water.
Here, the environment pretty much has the opposite effect on corpses. Look at the Windover Archaeological Site, a peat-bottomed pond in Florida that became the final resting place for dozens of Native Americans between 6, and 8, years ago. Skeletal remains from people have turned up in the peat. A large deposit of crushed-up snail shells lying under the pond supplies the water with magnesium and calcium carbonates. That makes the water more alkaline, neutralizing the sphagnan to an extent.
Instead of mummified skin bags, the bog is rife with naked bones and skeletons. Bare as they are on the outside, the ancient bones had a big surprise in store for scientists: Brain tissue was found in more than 90 of the Windover pond skulls. Most carnivorous plants — such as sundews and pitcher plants — grow in bog soils, which tend to be nutrient-poor.
Eating animal prey is a strategy that helps them obtain vital nutrients. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close.
Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Environmental Science. Earth Science. The Tollund Man was discovered in a Denmark bog in with skin so well-preserved, the wrinkles on his face are still clearly visible. It binds nitrogen, halting growth of bacteria and further mummifying the corpse.
This helps to explain why, after a thousand or so years of this treatment, a corpse ends up looking like a squished rubber doll. Nobody can say for sure whether the people who buried the bodies in the bog knew that the sphagnum moss would keep those bodies intact.
It appears highly unlikely—how would they? Still, it is tempting to think so, since it fits so perfectly the ritualistic function of bog bodies, perhaps regarded as emissaries to the afterworld. Along with wooden and bronze vessels, weapons and other objects consecrated to the gods, there was also an edible waxy substance made out of dairy or meat. Just this past summer, a turf-cutter found a pound hunk of bog butter in County Meath, Ireland. It is thought to be 2, years old, and while it smells pretty funky, this Iron Age comestible would apparently work just fine spread on 21st-century toast.
Like the vessels and weapons, bog butter may have been destined for the gods, but scholars are just as likely to believe that the people who put it there were simply preserving it for later. And if they knew a bog would do this for butter, why not the human body too? Much of what we know about bog bodies amounts to little more than guesswork and informed conjecture. The Bronze and Iron Age communities from which they come had no written language. Nearly all appear to have been killed, many with such savagery that it lends an air of grim purposefulness to their deaths.
Some victims may have been murdered more than once in several different ways. Scholars have come to call this overkilling, and it understandably provokes no end of speculation. We may never get a clear answer, and it now seems unlikely that a single explanation can ever fit all the victims. But the question keeps gnawing at us and gives bog bodies their clammy grip on the imagination.
For some strange reason, we identify. They are so alarmingly normal, these bog folk. You think, there but for the grace of the goddess went I. Seamus Heaney felt it, and wrote a haunting and melancholy series of poems inspired by the bog bodies. Before that, bodies found in bogs were often given a quick reburial in the local churchyard.
To the extent that peat still gets cut at all—environmentalists oppose peat extraction in these fragile ecosystems—the job now falls to large machines that often grind up what might have emerged whole from the slow working of a hand spade. The search for the origins of bog bodies and their secrets goes back a fairly long way, too.
In , a peat-cutter found a skeleton and a plait of hair in a bog on Drumkeragh Mountain. The property belonged to the Earl of Moira, and it was his wife, Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira, who pursued what we believe to be the first serious investigation of such a find, publishing her results in the journal Archaeologia. As more bog bodies turned up, more questions got asked. In the absence of clear answers, mythmaking and fancy rushed in to fill the void.
She was clamped to the moss with small staves through her elbows and knees. Danish historian and linguist Niels Matthias Petersen identified her as Queen Gunhild of Norway, who, legend tells us, died around , and was notoriously cruel, clever, wanton and domineering. According to the old stories, the Viking king Harald Bluetooth of Denmark enticed Gunhild over from Norway to be his bride. This explanation was not only accepted when Petersen first advanced it in , it was celebrated; Queen Gunhild became a reality star.
Nicholas in Vejle. Among the few dissident voices was that of a scrappy student, J. Worsaae, one of the principal founders of prehistoric archaeology.
Worsaae believed the folklore-based identification was hooey. Moreover, a second postmortem in the year found a thin line around her neck that had gone undetected.
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