Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (39 page)

Photograph by Jan van der Crab ben. (Creative Commons License. AttributionShareAlike 2.0)

Liitt- Witt Moor, a bog in Henstedt-Ulzburg in northern Germany.

Over the past 300 years or so, incredibly well-preserved human bodies
have been discovered in the desolate
peat bogs of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The
majority of these bog mummies or bog
bodies date to between the first century B.c. and the fourth century A.D.,
though the oldest dates from the
Mesolithic period (about 10,000 years
ago). There are also some medieval and
modern examples. The astonishing

preservative powers of the bogs have
prevented the decay of these ancient
remains so effectively that, although
the skeleton does not usually survive,
we have the skin, internal organs,
stomach (sometimes including the remains of the last meal), eyes, brains,
and hair.

A bog consists of about 90 percent
water. This water usually contains
large amounts of acidic peat (decaying
plant matter). Such an environment does not permit the growth of bacteria, so organic materials immersed in
this bog water, such as bodies, will not
be destroyed. Certain acids contained
in this bog water, together with the
cold temperature and the lack of oxygen, also act to preserve and tan the
skin, which explains the dark brown
color of most of the bodies. But how
and why did these people meet their
death in remote bogs thousands of
years ago? One thing we do know is
that a large amount of the bodies recovered show signs of extreme violence, including signs of torture and
murder.

Perhaps the most famous of these
bog mummies is Tollund Man, found
in May 1950, near the village of
Tollund in Denmark, by two brothers
cutting peat. When the men first
glimpsed the face staring up at them,
they thought it was a recent murder
victim and immediately contacted the
local police. But subsequent radiocarbon dating of Tollund Man's hair
showed that he had died around 350
B.c. During the operation to remove
the body from his resting place, one of
the helpers collapsed and died of a
heart attack. Perhaps, as the late
Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob suggested, this was a case of the bog claiming a life for a life. Tollund Man's body
had been arranged in a fetal position
at the time of death, and was naked
apart from a pointed skin cap and a
hide belt. His hair had been cropped
extremely short and there was stubble
clearly visible on his chin and upper
lip. A rope consisting of two leather
thongs twisted together was pulled
tightly around his neck, and it is believed that he was probably hanged or
garroted using this rope. Tests on the

contents of his stomach reveal that
Tollund Man's last meal had been a
kind of vegetable and seed soup. An
interesting fact about the soup is that
its ingredients were a mixture of various kinds of wild and cultivated seeds,
which included such an unusual quantity of knotweed that it must have been
gathered especially for the purpose.
One possibility is that the knotweed
was an important ingredient in a ritual
last meal that was somehow part of a
sacred execution rite. This possibility
is also suggested by the careful arrangement of the body and the fact
that his eyes and mouth had been
closed.

Around 500 bog bodies have been
found in Denmark, although there
have been no new finds there since the
1950s. Huldremose Woman, found in
a bog near Ramten, Jutland, in 1879,
was discovered with two skin capes, a
woollen skirt, a scarf, and a hair band.
Examination of the body revealed the
gruesome details that her arms and
legs had been repeatedly hacked, one
arm being cut completely off, before
she was deposited in the peat. The
woman met this brutal death sometime
between 160 B.c. and A.D. 340.

In 1952, near Windeby in
Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, two bodies were found in a
small bog. The first turned out to be
male who had been strangled and then
placed in the bog, the body held down
by sharpened branches stuck firmly
into the peat around him. The second
body was that of a young girl of about
14 years of age, dating to the first century A.D. The girl had been blindfolded
with a strip of cloth before being
drowned in the bog, her body secured
by a large stone and branches from a
birch tree.

Location of the Yde Girl find.

A more recent find from northern
Germany, from Uchte, Lower Saxony,
was at first thought to be the body of a
teenage murder victim. But when scientists reexamined the body in January of 2005 it was identified as a young
girl aged between 16 and 20, who had
been deposited in the bog in about 650
B.C. She subsequently became known
as the Girl of the Uchter Moor. Even
her hair had been preserved, though
archaeologists weren't sure whether
it was originally blonde or black, as
the peat turns all hair reddish.

The earliest recorded find of a bog
mummy anywhere in Europe is that of
the Kibbelgaarn body in the Netherlands, unearthed in 1791. In the 19th
and 20th centuries there were hundreds of discoveries made in Holland.
In 1987, the Drents Museum in Assen
commenced a project for the systematic research into the bog bodies in
their collection, revealing fascinating

and vital information about their age,
sex, physique, diet, diseases, cause of
death, and clothing.

In England, due to the wide variety of bog environment encountered,
bodies in many different states of preservation have been discovered. The
most famous of these come from
Lindow Moss near Wilmslow in
Chesire. The circumstances of the
discovery of the first body are very
curious indeed. In 1983, police in
Macclesfield, Cheshire were investigating a man named Peter Reyn-Bardt
for the murder of his wife, Malika, 23
years earlier. During the investigation, men working at a peat extraction
site adjacent to Reyn-Bardt's garden
discovered a well-preserved skull,
subsequently identified as coming from
a female aged between 30 and 50. Confronted with this evidence, ReynBardt confessed to the crime and was
convicted of murder on the strength of his confession. Prior to Reyn-Bardt's
trial, the police called in the Oxford
University Research Laboratory for
Archaeology to examine the body. The
result of their study of Lindow Woman,
as she became known, was that she was
between 1,660 and 1,820 years old.
Reyn-Bardt has since appealed his
murder conviction.

The following year, the body of a
man, naked but for an arm band made
of fox fur and a thin rope around his
neck, was unearthed in the same area.
Lindow Man had been in his 20s when
he died between A.D. 50 and A.D. 100.
Examination of the body revealed that
he had been hit twice on the crown of
his head, probably with an axe, with
sufficient force to detach chips of his
skull into his brain. He had also been
strangled using the leather garrote
still remaining around his neck, and
there was a gash on the throat, which
may indicate that his throat had been
cut. His hair had been trimmed (using
scissors) two or three days before he
met his death. The contents of his
stomach included burned bread and
traces of pollen from mistletoe, a plant
sacred to the Celts. Celtic scholar and
archaeologist Dr. Anne Ross believes
that the threefold death suffered by
Lindow Man, along with the blackened
crust in his stomach, and the traces of
mistletoe, suggest that the man was
the victim of a Druidic sacrifice.

More than 80 bodies have been recovered from the bogs of Ireland in the
past two centuries, seven of which have
been radiocarbon dated. Unlike the
rest of Northern Europe, the majority
of these bodies belong to the late medieval or post-medieval period, though
there are some from the Iron Age. One
Iron Age example, radiocarbon dated

to between 470 and 120 B.C., is Gallagh
Man, found by the O'Kelly family in
1821 at Gallagh, near Castleblakeney,
County Galway. After they unearthed
the body, the family would, for a small
fee, resurrect Gallagh Man for visitors
and then re-bury him again. This happened until 1829, when the body was
taken to the National Museum.
Gallagh Man was naked but for a deerskin cloak tied at the throat with a
band of willow rods, which may have
been used as a strangling device. As
with many other bog bodies that suffered violence, his hair had been
cropped short. He may have been a
criminal and suffered public execution,
as the body had been staked to the
ground with pointed wooden sticks,
possibly to prevent his soul from escaping, a practice known from some
Danish bog bodies.

In 1978, the body of a girl aged between 25 and 30 was discovered in
Meenybradden Bog, near Ardara,
County Donegal, Ireland. The girl,
with short cropped hair and eyelashes
and eyelids still intact, had been
wrapped in a woollen cloak and carefully placed in the grave. There was no
evidence of violence on the body, which
was radiocarbon dated to A.D. 1570. The
cause of death, and why she was buried in the bog, is still a mystery.

Two further Irish bog bodies were
found in 2003. The first was discovered in Clonycavan, County Meath,
north of Dublin, and the second in
Croghan, County Offaly, just 25 miles
away. Old Croghan Man, as he has
become known, was in his mid-20s and
a giant at around 6-feet 6-inches tall.
He has been dated between 362 B.C. and
175 B.C. Clonycavan Man, a young male
around 5-feet 2-inches tall, dates from between 392 B.c. and 201 B.C. In common with other bog bodies, they appear to have been brutally tortured
before their deaths, probably as ritual
sacrifices. Old Croghan Man's nipples
had been cut and he had been stabbed
in the ribs. A cut on his arm indicates
that he had tried to defend himself
during the attack. There were also
holes in both his upper arms, where a
hazel rope withy had been passed
through to bind him. He was later decapitated and dismembered before
being buried in the bog. In contrast to
his violent end, Croghan Man's body
revealed that he had well-manicured
nails and relatively smooth hands,
which indicate somebody who had
probably never performed any manual
work; perhaps he was a priest or a
member of the aristocracy. Clonycavan
Man suffered a massive wound to the
head, caused by a heavy axe that shattered his skull, and also several other
injuries on his body. One particularly
distinctive feature was his unusual
raised hairstyle, for which he had used
a kind of Iron Age hair gel, actually a
form of resin that had probably come
from south-western France or Spain.

Ned Kelly, keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, has developed a theory to explain
why 40 bodies discovered in Irish
bogland were made along tribal, political, and royal boundaries. His belief is
that the burials are offerings to fertility gods by kings to guarantee a successful reign. This is certainly a
possible explanation for many of the
Irish bog bodies, but what of the rest
of Northern Europe? The variety of different ways in which many of these
people were killed would suggest
something more than murder, prob

ably some kind of ritual sacrifice.
Other motives can be gleaned from the
Roman author Tacitus, writing in the
early second century A.D. about the
Germanic peoples. He mentions some
interesting customs connected with
crime and punishment in their culture,
including how "cowards, shirkers, and
those guilty of unnatural vices" (probably homosexuality and promiscuity)
were forced down into the bog under
a wicker hurdle. He also states that
adulterous wives were stripped naked,
had their heads shaved, and were
turned out of the house and flogged
through the village. There are certainly
indications from Tacitus that suggest
that many of the victims in the bogs had
broken some law or taboo of the society for which they were executed.