The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved Free

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The bog itself is little more than a spongy carpet of moss, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved a few sad trees poking out. An ethereal stillness hangs over it. A child would put it more simply: This place is really spooky. We tramped out to a desolate stretch of bog, trying to keep to the clumps of ocher-colored grass and avoid the clingy muck between them. The dead man wore a belt and an odd cap made of skin, but nothing else. Oh yes, there was also a plaited leather thong wrapped tightly around his neck. This is the thing that killed him. His skin was tanned a deep chestnut, and his body appeared rubbery and deflated. Otherwise, Tollund Man, as he would be called, looked pretty much like you and me, which is astonishing considering he lived some 2, years ago. The first time I saw him in his glass case at the Silkeborg Museum, a kind of embarrassed hush came over me, as if I had intruded on a sacred mystery. Apparently, this happens frequently. What really gets you is his lovely face with its closed eyes and lightly stubbled chin. It is disconcertingly peaceful for someone who died so violently. Reluctant perhaps, but not altogether unwilling. Where did you come from? How did you live? Who murdered you and why? But the way the researchers ask the questions, using new forensic techniques like dual-energy CT scanners and strontium tests, is getting more sophisticated all the time. To the people who put him there, a bog was a special place. While most of Northern Europe lay under a thick canopy of forest, bogs did not. Half earth, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved water and The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved to the heavens, they were borderlands to the beyond. They were fairies. Today we go about things entirely differently. The questions go on and on. Lately, Tollund Man has been enjoying a particularly hectic afterlife. Inhe was sent to the Natural History Museum in Paris to run his feet through a microCT scan normally used for fossils. By analyzing how minute quantities of strontium differ along a single strand, a researcher in Copenhagen hopes to assemble a road map of all the places Tollund Man traveled in his lifetime. But The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved age makes him an outlier. Radiocarbon dating tells us that the greater number of bog bodies went into the moss some time in the Iron Age between roughly B. The best-preserved bodies were all found in raised bogs, which form in basins where poor drainage leaves the ground waterlogged and slows plant decay. Over thousands of years, layers of sphagnum moss accumulate, eventually forming a dome fed entirely by rainwater. A raised bog contains few minerals and very little oxygen, but lots of acid. Add in low Northern European temperatures, and you have a wonderful refrigerator for conserving dead humans. A body placed here decomposes extremely slowly. As the sphagnum moss dies, it releases a carbohydrate polymer called sphagnan. 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 The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved 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, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved 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. Ina peat-cutter found a skeleton and a plait of hair in a bog on Drumkeragh Mountain. 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 aroundand 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 init 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. She had not been drowned but strangled. This changed everything, except perhaps for the victim. In the absence of hard evidence, the temptation to weave bog bodies The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved a national narrative proved hard to resist. By this time, two views prevailed. It was largely accepted that the majority of bog bodies dated to the Bronze and Iron Ages, but their murder was ascribed either to ritual sacrifice or criminal punishment. On the The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, Tacitus thought highly of the local inhabitants. He praised their forthrightness, bravery, simplicity, devotion to their chieftains and restrained sexual habits, which frowned on debauchery and favored monogamy and fidelity. To the researchers at the Ahnenerbe, bog bodies were the remains of degenerates The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved had betrayed the ancient code. Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; the cowardly, the unwarlike and those who disgrace their bodies are drowned in miry swamps under a cover of wicker. One of the few who dared was a historian of culture named Alfred Dieck, who perhaps The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved himself protected by his own Nazi Party membership. But the man who torpedoed the Aryan theory of bog bodies was prevented from working as an archaeologist after the war because of The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved Nazi past. Shortly after Tollund Man was discovered, the detective in charge of what was initially a missing persons investigation had the good sense to call in Peter Vilhelm Glob, who had recently been appointed professor of archaeology at the university in Aarhus, the nearest big city. Glob, as everyone refers to him, has stamped his name more deeply than anyone else on the riddle of the bog bodies. It is sharp, authoritative and moving all at once, and it remains intensely readable. Glob, who The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved insucceeded not only in providing the scaffolding for our understanding of Tollund Man and his kin, but in restoring their humanity as well. He conjured bog bodies back to life and made the world take notice of them. We can see the goddess paraded around, surrounded by fabulous animals, on the great silver Gundestrup cauldron, buried as a sacrifice in a Danish bog not far from where several Iron Age bodies were also found. And we know roughly the time of year when this occurred from the seasonal contents found in his stomach and that of other victims: barley, linseed and knotweed, among others, but no strawberries, blackberries, apples or hips from summer and autumn. Well, better you than me! Could he drink milk? Was he prone to diabetes? What about arteriosclerosis? This article is a selection from the May issue of Smithsonian magazine. Lindow Man is the most intact of several bodies discovered in the Lindow Moss The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved Cheshire, England, during the s. Except, says Farley, he may not be quite the same Lindow Man she first encountered all those years ago. Carbon dating puts his death somewhere between 2 B. He once stood around 5-foot His beard and mustache had been clipped by shears. Tollund Man - Wikipedia

A bog body is a human cadaver that has been naturally mummified in a peat bog. Such bodies, sometimes known as bog peopleare both geographically and chronologically widespread, having been dated to between BCE and the Second World War. Unlike most ancient human remains, bog bodies often retain their skin and internal organs due to the unusual conditions of the surrounding area. Combined together, highly acidic waterlow temperatureand a lack of oxygen preserve but severely tan their skin. While the skin is well-preserved, the bones are generally not, due to the dissolution of the calcium phosphate of bone by the peat's acidity. Such Iron Age bog bodies typically illustrate a number of similarities, such as violent deaths and a lack of clothing, which has led archaeologists to believe that they were killed and deposited in the bogs as a part of a widespread cultural tradition of human sacrifice or the execution of criminals. The German scientist Alfred Dieck published a catalog of more than 1, bog bodies that he had counted between The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved [6] [7] but most were unverified by documents or archaeological finds; [8] and a analysis of Dieck's work by German archaeologists concluded that much of his work was unreliable. The preservation of bog bodies in peat bogs is a natural phenomenon, and not the result of human mummification processes. A limited number of bogs have the correct conditions for preservation of mammalian tissue. Most of these are located in colder climates near bodies of salt water. The bog acids, with pH levels similar to vinegar, conserve the human bodies in the same way as fruit is preserved by pickling. This environment, highly acidic and devoid of oxygen, denies the prevalent subsurface aerobic organisms any opportunity to initiate decomposition. Researchers discovered that conservation also required that they place The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved body in the bog during the winter or early spring when the water temperature is cold—i. The bog chemical environment involves a completely saturated acidic environment, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved considerable concentrations of organic acids and aldehydes are present. Layers of sphagnum and peat assist in preserving the cadavers by enveloping the tissue in a cold immobilizing matrix, impeding water circulation and any oxygenation. An additional feature of anaerobic preservation by acidic bogs is the ability to conserve hair, clothing and leather items. Most of the bog bodies discovered showed some aspects of decay or else were not properly conserved. When such specimens are exposed to the The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved atmosphere, they may begin to decompose rapidly. As a result, many specimens have been effectively destroyed. As ofthe number of specimens that have been preserved following discovery was The oldest bog body that has been identified is the Koelbjerg Man from Denmark, who has been dated to BCE, during the Mesolithic period. Around BCE, [15] agriculture was introduced to Denmark, either through cultural exchange or by migrating farmers, marking the beginning of the Neolithic in the region. The vast majority of the bog bodies The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved have been discovered date from the Iron Agea period of time when peat bogs covered a much larger area of northern Europe. Many of these Iron Age bodies bear a number of similarities, indicating a known cultural tradition of killing and depositing these people in a certain manner. These Pre-Roman Iron Age peoples lived in sedentary communities, who had built villages, and whose society was hierarchical. They were agriculturalistsraising animals in captivity as well as growing crops. In some parts of northern Europe, they also fished. Although independent of the Roman Empirewhich The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved southern Europe at this time, the inhabitants traded with the Romans. For these people, the bogs held some sort of liminal significance, and indeed, they placed into them votive offerings intended for the Otherworld, often of neck-ringswristlets or ankle-rings made of bronze or more rarely gold. The archaeologist P. Glob believed that these were "offerings to the gods of fertility and good fortune. Many bog bodies show signs of being stabbedbludgeonedhanged or strangledor a combination of these methods. In some cases the individual had been beheaded. In the case of the Osterby Man found at Kohlmoor, near OsterbyGermany inthe head had been deposited in the bog without its body. Usually, the corpses were naked, sometimes with some items of The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved with them, particularly headgear. The clothing is believed to have decomposed while in the bog for so long. According to the archaeologist P. Glob"this probably indicates the wish to pin the dead man firmly The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved the bog. Some bog bodies, such as Tollund Man from Denmark, have been found with the rope used to strangle them still around their necks. Some, such as the Yde Girl in the Netherlands and bog bodies in Ireland, had the hair on one side of their heads closely cropped, although this could be due to one side of their head being exposed to oxygen for a longer period of time than the other. Some of the bog bodies seem consistently to have been members of the upper class: their fingernails are manicured, and tests on hair protein routinely record good nutrition. Strabo records that the Celts practiced auguries on the entrails of human victims: on some bog bodies, such as the Weerdinge Men found in the northern Netherlands, the entrails have been partly drawn out through incisions. Modern techniques of forensic analysis now suggest that some injuries, such as broken bones and crushed skulls, were not the result of torture, but rather due to the weight of the bog. The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, a CT scan of Grauballe Man by Danish scientists determined his skull was fractured due to pressure from the bog long after his death. Amongst the most recent, the corpse of Meenybradden Woman found in Ireland dates to the 16th century and was found in unhallowed ground, with evidence indicating that she may have committed suicide and was therefore buried in the bog rather than in the churchyard because she had committed a Christian sin. A number of skeletons found in Florida have been called "bog people". These skeletons are the remains of people buried in peat between 5, and 8, years ago, during the Early and Middle Archaic period in the Americas. The peat at the Florida sites is loosely consolidated and much wetter than The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved European bogs. As a result, the skeletons are well preserved, but skin and most internal organs have not The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved preserved. An exception is that preserved brains have been found in nearly skulls at Windover Archaeological Site and in one of several burials at Little Salt Spring. Textiles were also preserved with some of the burials, the oldest known textiles in Florida. Archaeologists believe that early Archaic Native Americans buried the bodies in a freshwater pond when the sea level was much lower. The peat in the ponds helped preserve the skeletons. Ever since the Iron Age, humans have used the bogs to harvest peata common fuel source. On various occasions throughout history, peat diggers have come across bog bodies. Records of such finds go back as far as the 17th century, and in a bog body was discovered at Shalkholz Fen in HolsteinGermany. This was possibly the first-ever such discovery recorded. The first more fully documented account of the discovery of a bog body was at a peat bog on Drumkeragh Mountain in County DownIreland ; it was published by Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira[33] the wife of the local landowner. Throughout the 18th and 19th The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, when such bodies were discovered, they were often removed from the bogs and given a Christian burial on consecrated church ground in keeping with the religious beliefs of the community who found them, who often assumed that they were relatively modern. With the rise of antiquarianism in the 19th century, some people began to speculate that many of the bog bodies were not recent murder victims but were ancient in origin. Inat Corselitze on Falster in Denmark, a bog body unusually buried with ornaments seven glass beads and a bronze pin was unearthed and subsequently given a Christian burial. By order of the Crown Prince Frederickwho was an antiquarian, the body was dug up again and sent to the National Museum of Denmark. Glob, it was "he, more than anyone else, [who] helped to arouse the wide interest in Danish antiquities" such as the bog bodies. This view was disputed by the archaeologist The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. Worsaaewho argued that the body was Iron Age in origin, like most bog bodies, and predated any historical persons by at least years. His body was subsequently smoked as an early attempt at conservation and put on display in a museum. Until the midth century, it was not readily apparent at the time of discovery whether a body had been buried in a bog for years, decades, or centuries. But, modern forensic and medical technologies such as radiocarbon dating have been developed that allow researchers to more closely determine the age of the burial, the person's age at death, and other details. Scientists have been able to study the skin of the bog bodies, reconstruct their appearance and even determine what their last meal was from their stomach contents since peat marsh preserves soft internal tissue. Their teeth also indicate their age at death and what type of food they ate throughout their lifetime. Forensic facial reconstruction is one technique used in studying the bog bodies. Originally designed for identifying modern faces in crime investigations, this technique is a way of working out the facial features of a person by the shape of their skull. Yde Girl and her modern reconstruction are displayed at the Drents Museum in Assen. Hundreds of bog bodies have been recovered and studied. Inthe German scientist Alfred Dieck catalogued more than 1, bog bodies, but later scholarship revealed much of the Dieck's work was erroneous, and an exact number of discovered bodies is unknown. Several bog bodies are notable for the high quality of their preservation and the substantial research by archaeologists and forensic scientists. These include:. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Corpse conserved in a bog. Main article: List of bog bodies. Journal of Danish Archaeology. Edward Hart and Dan McCabe. London: Faber and Faber. Bauerochse, Andreas ed. Bog-bodies in Lower Saxony — rumours and facts: an analysis of Alfred Dieck's sources of information. Peatlands: archaeological sites, archives of nature, nature conservation, wise use; proceedings of the Peatland Conference in Hannover, Germany. Bog Bodies: Reluctant Time Travelers. El Paso: University of Texas. Archived from the original on Retrieved Wilfried Rosendal and Alfried Wiczorec. John Hillkirk. Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved 3 December Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida. Florida's Indians from Ancient Times to the Present. National Geographic. Retrieved 2 March The Bog People - Wikipedia

Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site. Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. One spring morning two men cutting peat in a Danish bog uncovered a well-preserved body of a man with a noose around his neck. Thinking they had stumbled upon a murder victim, they reported their discovery to the police, who were baffled until they consulted the famous archaeologist P. Glob identified the body as that The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved a two-thousand-year-old man, ritually murdered and thrown in the bog as a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility. Home 1 Books 2. Add to Wishlist. Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Members save with free shipping everyday! See details. Overview One spring morning two men The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved peat in a Danish bog uncovered a well-preserved body of a man with a noose around his neck. Includes 76 black-and-white photographs. Product Details About the Author. Pages: Sales rank:Product dimensions: 6. About the Author P. Although The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved professional interest took him from Greenland to the Arabian Gulf, his most sustained study was of his native country. Elizabeth Wayland Barber received her Ph. Her research and The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved focus on various aspects of anthropology and language. She teaches archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College. Paul T. Barber received his Ph. Related Searches. This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South to work in industries up North. Delivered by day into the searing inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter View Product. Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the A tale The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament. In the s, the young J. Ackerley spent several months in India as the Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art. Baroness Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg hailed from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury—until the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits. Thereafter her existence was a story of connivance and stratagem, a succession Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. New York Review Books.