FREE THE BOG PEOPLE: IRON-AGE MAN PRESERVED PDF P. V Glob | 304 pages | 31 Aug 2004 | The New York Review of Books, Inc | 9781590170908 | English | New York, United States Bog body - Wikipedia 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.