The Morthouse

This is Yingpan Man. Or, more specifically: These are the clothes he was buried in. He’s another of the Tarim Basin mummies, though he’s much younger, historically speaking, than Cherchen Man. He lived sometime in the fourth or fifth centuries A.D.

Heather Pringle’s post from a few years back on Archaeology’s blog offers some background on the mummy and his clothes, which were featured in the recent traveling exhibit Secrets of the Silk Road. She consults Sinologist (and Tarim Basin mummy expert) Victor Mair. 

The magnificent trappings of Yingpan Man are the first things that visitors lay eyes on in the exhibit. The Chinese government did not send the remains of the European-looking 6-footer who wore his brown hair in a topknot. But as Mair pointed out, Yingpan Man’s “sartorial shell” alone speaks volumes. Dating to the 4th or early 5th century AD, the attire of this ancient traveler clearly embodies all the wealth and splendor that flowed through the Tarim Basin after the Silk Road opened and linked China to the Mediterranean world. […]

Who was Yingpan Man? Mair has some ideas. He died in his early to mid-thirties, and he had clearly amassed a fortune by that point, most likely through trade. The town of Yingpan, after all, was an crucial trade node on the Silk Road. During this period, Mair pointed out, the richest traders along the route were Sogdians, an Iranian-speaking people whose homeland lay near Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan. So Mair believes that Yingpan man was likely a Sogdian merchant who died relatively young in a place far from home.

The fact that I’m just seeing clothes here—and no mummy—kind of creeps me out a little. The same way this did.

Image source: Yingpan Man by Penn Museum on Flickr:

“Yingpan Man,” front view of clothed body of male mummy, ca 3rd-4th century AD. Excavated from Yingpan, Yuli (Lopnur) County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, © Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology.

This is Cherchen Man. He stood about six feet tall, had light hair and fair skin, and he lived about 3,000 years ago in what is today the Xinjiang region of western China. He sports facial tattoos. And the world’s oldest surviving pair of pants.

He’s among a group of mummies found in the Tarim Basin dating from between about 1900 B.C. and 200 A.D. I’ve wanted to write about them for a while.

I recently watched China’s Secret Mummies, a National Geographic video available on the Penn Museum’s website. It’s about 45 minutes long; unfortunately, more than half of those 45 minutes are eaten up by bullshit reenactment footage and suspense-making editing. But it’s still a good overview of the mummies, and it reveals what researchers from National Geographic’s Genographic Project were able to learn from their DNA.

What they found was surprising. After the mummies were discovered, their Caucasian facial features and woolen (sometimes plaid) textiles led many to speculate that they came from Europe, or—more fancifully—were Celts.

Sidenote: As a former Celticist (air quotes), I find this conclusion funny. I refuse to think of “Celt” as anything more than a linguistic designation, or something denoting a discrete genetic or cultural group. (Interesting and surprising read: The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story by Stephen Oppenheimer.)

Anyway, like I said, the DNA results were surprising. Cherchen Man and his mummy-buddies showed east Asian genetic markers, leading the researchers to revise their understanding of the Tarim people. Likely, they were a mixed group—different cultures from east and west coexisting (and sleeping together) at a crossroads—rather than a western transplant culture hanging on in an unlikely eastern outpost, as had been previously thought. 

Hope to post about some of the other Tarim mummies in the near future.

Image Source: Uyghur American Association.

This is what’s left of a man in his early twenties who lived in Ireland sometime between 362 and 175 B.C. He’s just a partial torso and arms, and from the span of the arms they know that he stood about 6 feet 6 inches: exceptionally tall for that time. (I’ll say. That’s exceptionally tall for today.)

He’s known as Old Croghan Man, and he was found in 2003 near Croghan Hill, north of Daingean in Ireland’s County Offaly. Like all bog bodies, his real identity is unknown, but researchers have posited that he was a man of high status. His hands were well manicured, his last meal was wheat and buttermilk (possibly a ritual meal), and in the months leading up to his death he ate lots of meat. He wore a braided leather band and copper amulet around one bicep.

Despite the comfortable life suggested by nice nails and meaty diet, Old Croghan Man did not die a nice death. From Archaeology: 

He had a defensive wound on his upper left arm where he may have tried to protect himself, and had been bound by a hazel branches (withies) threaded through holes in his upper arms, stabbed in the chest, struck in the neck, decapitated, and cut in half. 

I recently watched an episode of Nova from 2006 (The Perfect Corpse), which featured Old Croghan Man and Clonycavan Man, a bog body from around the same time period who was found near Dublin, also in 2003. 

Eamonn P. Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland (where the bodies now reside) has some interesting theories about a number of Irish bog bodies, including these two. From Archaeology:

Examining the details of both men’s lives and deaths has led Kelly to suggest a new way of looking at the meaning of eight well-preserved Irish bog bodies. “I believe these men were failed kings or failed candidates for kingship who were killed and placed in bogs that formed important tribal boundaries.” Both Clonycavan and Old Croghan men’s nipples were pinched and cut. “Sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland,” says Kelly. “Cutting them would have made him incapable of kingship.”

Image source: Photograph by Mark Healy, via Wikipedia.

This is the head of Porsmose Man, a skeletonized bog body found in 1946 near the town of Næstved in Denmark.

As fucked up as that arrowhead through the nasal cavity looks, that’s not even what killed him. Rather, he was killed by an arrow through the breastbone that pierced his aorta. The arrows were likely fired from above, at a close distance. Archaeologists suspect he was either surprised by his attackers or was the victim of an execution. In either case, he was thrown in a lake.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Rendswühren Man was found in 1871 near Kiel, Germany, and he lived sometime between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. He was about 40-50 years old when he died.

As I’ve mentioned before, bog bodies haven’t always met with the best treatment by their handlers. From Discover’s great 1997 article on bog bodies:

Not surprisingly, few people who uncovered these corpses in the past recognized their true significance, and it was only by chance that a museum would learn of a fresh discovery. Tollund Man was preserved because one of the police officers summoned to the scene happened to be a board member of a local museum. But even when a museum did get hold of a body, researchers had no established protocol for preserving prehistoric corpses and often did a poor job. […] In truth, there was little incentive to do better, since researchers lacked the means of getting information out of corpses and were thus more interested in any vessels, jewelry, and other artifacts that might be found alongside them. Many of the early bog bodies were reburied in churchyards or shunted off into storage, where they soon dried out. Not until after World War II did researchers begin to preserve the bodies more carefully. Generally they used beeswax, rubbing the mummies’ leathery skin with the stuff to give them the look of a highly polished shoe. 

Of course, Rendswühren Man was no exception. P.V. Glob writes The Bog People (via):

This well preserved human body naturally aroused much interest and before being dispatched to Kiel it was exhibited on a farm cart in a nearby barn. During this period visitors helped themselves lavishly to souvenirs both from the body itself and from the clothing. The dead man became the first bog man to be photographed—being stood up on the tips of his toes for the purpose.

Because no better methods of preservation were known at the time, he was smoked at the local butcher’s. Like a ham. 

You’re welcome.

(Image Source: Nova’s Perfect Corpse slideshow. Note this other, less louche view. Did museum visitors complain?)

New research about the prehistoric Scottish site of Cladh Hallan indicates that Bronze Age inhabitants of Britain were practicing their own form of mummification. Read more on the BBC website.

(Image Source: mumienwelt.de)

Bocksten Man: one of the best-preserved bodies from the medieval era.

I first read about and saw pictures of the mummy trove of Vác, Hungary, on Atlas Obscura: 

“Everything from the rosaries to the handmade stockings on their feet were equally intact, offering a gold mine for ethnographers on the funerary customs and everyday life of 18th century Hungarian villages. There was something there for doctors as well; traces of ancient tuberculosis. An Australian surgeon, Dr. Mark Spigelman, has devoted the past 6 years to studying the bacteria found in one mummy in particular, and the information gleaned from this ancient DNA could provide information that will help fight tuberculosis.”

Picture Source: Morbid Anatomy, which also has some really nice pictures of these mummies.