Bog bodies or mummies of peat bogs

A rare and highly studied phenomenon in archeology, peat mosses are mummified corpses found in the marshes of northern Europe in great numbers in an excellent state of conservation.

Many are fascinated by Egyptian mummies. Yet little attention has been paid to natural mummification, especially to that which took place in Europe a long time ago and also quite recently.


This mummy dates from the Iron Age, nothing less. Named "the man of Tollund" and discovered in Denmark, it is certainly one of the mummies of the oldest and best conserved bogs. It was discovered in 2003.

The Peat Humans are mummified bodies that have been naturally preserved in European swamps. To date, more than two-thousand were found, the most recent being Soviet soldiers of the last war. The oldest, such as the Man of Tollund, date back to the Iron Age.

Tollund's man, with his rope around his neck, was probably the victim of a human sacrifice, like many other mummies. Indeed, European civilizations existing in the Iron Age have left behind no writing describing their customs and beliefs. Yet the bodies found at the bottom of the marshes have some similarities: the vast majority of them seem to have experienced a violent death. The historians are therefore divided between two hypotheses: human sacrifices or deaths in war which would have been thrown to the bottom of the peat? These two explanations are likely to be valid.

The marshes in which the mummies were found also share some peculiarities: they are all extremely acid, contain little or no oxygen, all at low temperatures. These three factors kept the skin and hair of the corpses perfectly, even though the bones had melted. Indeed, the acidity of the environment in which the bodies have bathed for sometimes more than 2300 years has completely melted the bones. On the other hand, the organs are still there.

Many bodies discovered have bodily malformations, such as scoliosis. This is the case of the "Yde Girl", leaving its marsh in 1897 in the Netherlands. Assuming she was 16 years old, she would have been hunchbacked. These physical handicaps found in several mummies favor the thesis of human sacrifice.

On the other hand, "Clonycavan Man", found in Ireland in 2003, does not share the same characteristics. Indeed, it does not appear to be a simple victim of murder or human sacrifice. His body presents wounds that seem to have been inflicted voluntarily and with extreme violence.

The broken nose, split skull, and finally ripped open before being thrown to the bottom of a bog, the Clonycavan Man divides the experts between the two theses. Victim of war or human sacrifice?

The Grauballe Man is currently one of the best preserved peat bogs. His throat was cut from ear to ear and he was discovered in the company of many other corpses. Surely all victims of human sacrifices.

To conclude, no one is certain of the reasons why these human beings died before or when they sank into the peat bogs. It is possible to admire some of these mummies in museums where they were restored and where they are preserved with the greatest care.

Anecdotes:


- The Man of Gromballe is stuffed with straw

- the man of Tollund was so well preserved that the police were called on discovery. Indeed, some believed that it was a victim of murder

- the acidity of the environment where these bodies were preserved rendered their black skin

Koelbjerg woman

These mummies were dated for the oldest, Koelbjerg woman, at 3500 BC. J.-C and for the most recent in the 16th century. But most of these mummies are generally attributed to the Celtic culture of the Iron Age.



Reconstruction made by Prof. Dr. Richard Helmer, Bonn.

The chemical composition of peat has excellent conditions for the conservation of soft tissues and therefore allows very detailed and often very precise analyzes thanks to the different investigative techniques. In the case of peat males, the forensic expertise generally used in police investigations proved valuable. Facial reconstruction was also used for the first time. The conservation of the fabrics made it possible to reconstruct the face of several mummies such as the Yde Girl exposed at the museum of Drenthe in Assen or the man of Lindow exposed at the British Museum in London.

The Yde Girl







Facial reconstruction of the Yde Girl.

Yde young girl is a peat mummy exhumed near the small village of Yde in the Bourtange marshes of the Netherlands. It was discovered on May 12, 1897, in a state of preservation quite remarkable (especially its hair), but it was two weeks before the body was sent to the authorities; In the meantime, it had suffered numerous deterioration.

Carbon 14 tests showed that Yde's daughter died between -54 and 128 AD, at the approximate age of 16 years old. She wore long blond - redish hair, but a part of her skull seems to have been shaved before her execution. Tomography showed that this girl was suffering from scoliosis.

The body was wrapped in a woolen cloak and wore a cord with a knot tied around the neck, which led to the conclusion that the girl had been executed or sacrificed. The body also has the mark of a stab at the clavicle, which however did not cause death. As with most peat bogs, the skin and facial features have been preserved thanks to the tannic acid of the peat. When Yde girl was brought to light, the workers accidentally severed her body, destroying the rib cage. The body has been exhibited for decades in a museum without any further research being done before 1992.

In that year, Professor Richard Neave of the University of Manchester, analyzing the skull by tomography, determined the age of the dead and dated the mummy. Yde's daughter made another mention of her when Neave published a reconstruction of the features of her face, relying on techniques of aesthetic surgery and pathology. The body and reconstruction of the face are now on display at the Drenthe Museum in Assen.

The revealed face presents diformities: small constitutive elements (eyes, mouth etc.), fairly wide eyes and a very high and very straight forehead. A curvature of the vertebral column was also revealed by scannography. Archaeologists have assumed the hypothesis of his infirmity as the cause of his sacrifice, for then considered as "disadvantaged by the gods".

The Lindow Man





The Lindow Man is a mummy preserved in a natural bog, discovered on 1 August 1984 in the peat bog of Lindow Moss (Wilmslow), in Scotch by peat farmers. The local press nicknamed the body "Pete Marsh" (with a word game on peat marsh, "peat bog" in English). The body has been lyophilized for conservation and is exhibited in 2010 in Gallery 50 of the British Museum. The room where it is kept is the best thermostatted of the museum, because its fragility is such that even during the works it was considered wiser to leave it in a sarcophagus rather than risk moving it.

Archaeological data

The Carbon-14 dating of the Man of Lindow made it possible to locate the date of his death between -2 and 119 of our era. He was about 25 years old, measured 1.68 m and weighed between 60 and 65 kg. What is remarkable about this man of the peat bogs is the fierceness with which he was put to death: his execution is considered to have begun with the three blows carried to the head that were raised on the skull, An incision in the throat. Finally, around his neck was found a tight cord. The corpse was found face folded over the bust in a bog Lindow Moss. These characteristics, in particular the triple mode of execution, evoke a "ritual murder" insofar as the triads are attributes of the Celtic religion. As to whether it was a human sacrifice, an execution, or both at the same time, the specialists are divided: as the accounts of human sacrifices among the Celts are the work of historians who are foreign to this culture , The details found there are a priori suspect.

The Lindow Man was discovered on August 1, 1984 by two men who were working at the peeling shredder for their business in Cheshire County. Andy Mold and Stephan Dooley pulled the big stones out of the pit or the wooden branches buried under the peat, as they could damage their machine, when they uncovered what appeared to be a broken soccer ball. But when they uncovered the object from its peat moss, they recognized the unequivocal features of a human face and contacted the county police. At the first examination some hair was still attached to the scalp, and the globe of the left eye was intact; Parts of the encephalon were still visible. During the following years, new remains of the human body of Lindow could be found: the deteriorated arms (which made it possible to determine its size), the torso and the right foot (end of 1984), then in 1988 the shreds of Skin, legs, buttocks and right thigh.

The acidity of the bog has preserved the contents of the stomach: the last meal consisted largely of cooked cereals (wheat, bran and barley), which corresponds more to a sacrificial offering than to an ordinary meal. The presence of mistletoe pollen in the stomach of the victim first seemed very suggestive, given the place of this plant in the druidic tradition: mistletoe is a poisonous plant known to cause convulsions, so That it is unlikely that a man accidentally ingested it; Moreover, this mode of poisoning is well documented in the Celtic literature subsequent to the Roman occupation. But Gordon Hillman (1986) rightly pointed out that pollen found in the intestines is more likely to be pollen that has settled on the stigma of cereal flowers, then ingested with the seeds.

Archaeologist Anne Ross, relying on the fact that this man did not perform manual tasks, believes that the Man of Lindow was a druid. She suggests that he has lent himself to a sacrifice, perhaps at Beltaine, after a meal of symbolically burned seed bread. The writer John Grigsby believes he sees in the death of the Man of Lindow a mimetic experience of rebirth and death related to the rites of Nerthus and Attis, a theory supported by the fact that the chemical analysis of the skin Seems to show that Lindow's Man had painted his body with a vegetable green pigment.

The Clonycavan Man




The Clonycavan man is the mummified body of a man found in a bog at Clonycavan (Meath County, Ireland) during the winter of 2003. His hairstyle is the earliest example of a known Iroquois crest.

Discovery

Spotted in the enormous sieve of an agricultural machine, he was naked, head turned to the left, legs and forearms torn off by the machine that had exhumed him from the bog. His head and chest showed signs of violence before being thrown into the bog: he had received three stone ax blows to the head, which had opened his skull, leaving the parts of his brain, he had also received one Blow to the chest and had been ripped open. While he was resting in the peat, the weight of the sphagnum sprinkled with water had flattened his shattered head and the dark waters had tanned his skin like leather and gave his brown hair an orange tint.

A call was made to the archaeological community because it was not the victim of a commonplace murder: Clonycavan's man was indeed a mummy of peat bogs naturally embalmed, which in his own way testified mysterious rituals In use during the iron age in northern Europe, in the centuries just before and after the birth of Christ. A 14 carbon dating indicates that the body was thrown into the bog between 392 and 201 BC. BC Preserved by the absence of oxygen and the antimicrobial compounds of sphagnum, hundreds of these strange mummies have been found in the wetlands of Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Holland and particularly Of Denmark.

Use of capillary gel in Protohistory

Clonycavan's man's head-dress does not fail to astonish his observers. In addition to the hair cut short on the neck, it possesses what we could today call a form of Iroquois crest, popularized by the punk movement. This 20-centimeter trow could perhaps allow this man to grow larger. Indeed, its size, estimated at 1.57 m, was small for a man, even between the 2nd and 4th centuries BC. This gel consisted of a mixture of vegetable oil and resin from pines. No trees produced this type of resin in Ireland. That of the man of Clonycavan was therefore imported. A study reveals that it came from the south of Spain or the southwest of France. To bring such a cosmetic product from a distance so far reveals, no doubt, the high social level of the man killed.

Reasons for Sacrifice

A study carried out in the National Museum of Ireland's Bog bodies Research Project, which concentrated on several mummies, including that of Oldcroghan and Clonycavan, proposed to see in these deaths traces of rituals of royalty. Some woodcuts found near the deceased (in Ralaghan and Corlea in particular) were identified at border markers. This kind of object appears to have been used on the occasion of the enthronement of a new king and the bodies were deposited in areas marking the border of the royal domain.

The Grauballe Man






At Moesgaard Museum (Denmark).

A peat man is a dead human whose mummified remains have been preserved in a peat bog in northern Europe (Scandinavia, British Isles in particular). Unlike most old corpses, as a result of special conditions of conservation, the bodies of the peat bogs present samples of skin and internal organs very well preserved: under certain conditions, the acidity of the water, Cold and the absence of oxygen concur to dry and naturally tanner the skin of the corpses; The skeleton, on the other hand, is rarely intact, as the acidity of the peat dissolves the calcium phosphate which forms the framework of the bones.

The men of the peat bogs are vestiges of great interest to archeology. Some anatomical or morphological details have been preserved on these bodies, such as tattoos or fingerprints. The Danish forensic doctor C.H. Vogelius Andersen was even surprised to find that the fingerprints of the man from Grauballe were sharper than his own. The beard and features of the Tollund man are also particularly well preserved.

Chronological data

More than a thousand bodies have been extracted from peatlands associated with the Celtic culture of the Iron Age, although the oldest mummy of peat bogs, Koelbjerg's wife, discovered on the island of Fionie, was dated 8000 Av. J.-C and thus dates back to the early Mesolithic. The most recent mummy is that of an Irish woman of the sixteenth century who had to be buried in unconsecrated ground because she had committed suicide. The earliest Celtic corpses date back to the fourth century BC. J.-C.

Mummified remains of humans and animals have been found in peatlands in Great Britain, Ireland, Northern Germany, the Netherlands (Drenthe, New Zealand), Denmark (Jutland) and southern Sweden. The first mention of such finds dates back to the eighteenth century (mummy of Kibbelgaarn in the Netherlands in 1791). The first body found in a bog and photographed dates back to 1898. The discovery took place in Nederfrederiksmose (Denmark). It is impossible to say at the outset, when one discovers such a corpse, whether it was buried a decade ago, a century or a few millennia: the progress made by forensic medicine in the twentieth century ( Such as radio broadcasting, CT scans, 3D images), which allowed us to know more about the time these men lived, their age at the time of their death, and so on. Biologists were able to study the skin fragments, reconstruct the facial features or determine the last foods absorbed before death by analyzing the contents of the stomach. The dentition also allows to determine the approximate age of the death and its diet.

Causes of death

Many men of the peat bogs seem to have been executed, in very different ways: stabbed, slaughtered, clubbed or hanged. The breasts of the man of Croghan, for example, were sliced. The corpses were sometimes decapitated, then deliberately thrown into the bog, and sunk under the mud with a perch, willow fascines or hazelnut wands.

The Germans, and many other peoples of antiquity, often practiced their sacrifices in the marshes, hence the semantics attached to these places, marked as passages between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The Latin writer Tacitus also reports that they executed the cowards, the fugitives, and those who lacked ardor in combat by precipitating them into a swamp: "Proditores and transfugas arboribus suspendunt, ignavos and imbelles and corpore infames cćno ac palude, injecta Insuper crate, mergunt. "(" They hang traitors and fugitives from trees, and drown cowards, sick people and those who refuse to fight in the mire and marshes, covering them with branches.

The Tollund Man






If the results of forensic investigations do not always make it possible to discriminate if it was a consecutive execution of a crime committed by the victim or a religious sacrifice, the victim signs: deformity, malformation, lameness, strangeness , Very often associated with the recovered bodies, orient in these cases in the sense of a sacrificial death. Some corpses, such as the man from Tollund (Denmark) or the man from Lindow (England), were found with the rope that was used to strangle them. Others, like the daughter of Yde in the Netherlands and the mummies of Ireland, had hair cut very short on a part of the skull. The men of the peatlands belonged mainly to the well-to-do class: their nails are manicured and the tests carried out on the cutaneous proteins reveal an abundant feed. We know from the geographer Strabo that the Celts practiced divination on the entrails of sacrificed men. Indeed, certain bodies (eg, one of Weerdinge's men found in the Netherlands in the southern province of Drenthe) The entrails were extracted in part by incisions.

However, as suggested by a National Geographic article, it is possible that in some cases the injuries were not inflicted by other men, but simply result from the pressure exerted by the peat: this would explain the many cases Where the bones seem to have been crushed. Provided that peat is capable of exerting substantial pressure, since a peat bog is the result of filling a lacustrine area, is an intermediate medium and is still relatively recent, and the peat density is particularly high low.

A study conducted in the National Museum of Ireland's Bog bodies Research Project, which focused on several mummies, including that of Croghan and that of Clonycavan, proposed to see in these deaths the traces of rituals of royalty. Some woodcuts found near the deceased (in Ralaghan and Corlea in particular) were identified at border markers. A wooden container also contained peat bog butter (at Rosberry). These objects appear to have been used on the occasion of the induction of a new king and the bodies would have been deposited in areas marking the border of the royal domain.

Consequences for archeology

In the case of the "mummies" of Cladh Hallan, immersions in peat could be interpreted as a primal embalming technique for the nobles.

Today, X-rays are an important preliminary step for the examination of peat bog men, as they allow to draw the shape of the intact mummy within the peat moss. The body can then be released without risk of damaging it by early digging. Carbon-14 dating is very commonly used, as it makes it possible to locate the period of burial chronologically, at least until the end of the Palaeolithic. As to the causes of death, in many cases, it is a violent death or even an execution. Tollund's man, for example, had a tight lace around his neck and the man from Windeby I was pushed into the middle of the swamp with a pole.

As peat preserves soft tissue, the contents of the stomach can almost always be analyzed. It is thus possible to know precisely the diet of these populations. Facial reconstruction also gives impressive results; Originally designed to identify victims of contemporary crimes, this technique allows reconstructing the facial features from the skull shape and the age of the victim at the time of death. Thus, Richard Neave of the University of Manchester was able to reconstruct in 1993 the face of the daughter of Yde, from tomographies of the skull. This mummy and its facial reconstruction are exhibited at the Drenthe Museum in Assen. It was also possible to reconstruct the face of the man from Lindow (British Museum in London), and Windeby I (Archäologisches Landesmuseum, Schleswig, Germany).

Translated from french article.

Source :
http://messagesdelanature.ek.la/les-...bieres-p956878