The Morthouse

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.

This is Röst Girl, a toddler who lived sometime between 200 B.C.E. and 80 C.E. in what is now Germany. She’s possibly the youngest bog body ever found.

Unfortunately, she no longer even exists. She was destroyed (along with so many other cultural artifacts and treasures) during the Second World War. Only the woolen cloak that was placed over her body in the bog remains, and this was used to date her.

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?)

Thought I’d get back to bog bodies again, folks.

This is Haraldskær Woman. She was found in Denmark in 1835 and was one of the first bog bodies studied by archaeologists. Found on her back, she was naked (though a leather cape and some woollen clothes were laid on top of her), and she was pinned down by branches and wooden poles. 

Some more gories from Wikipedia:

The complete skin envelope and the internal organs were both intact. The body had a lancing wound to the knee joint area, where some object (possibly one of the sharp poles) penetrated to some depth. Her skin was deeply bronzed with a robust skin tone due to tannins in the peat, and all the body joints were preserved with overlying skin in a state as if she had died only recently. Doctors determined she had been about 50 years old when she died and in good health without signs of degenerative diseases (such as arthritis) which are typically found in human remains of that age.

In 1979, doctors at Århus Hospital undertook a further forensic examination of the Haraldskær Woman. By this time, the body had desiccated, shrunken, and the skin was leathery, severely wrinkled and folded. A CT-scan of the cranium more accurately determined her age to be about 40 years old at the time of her death. The body height now measured only 1.33 m (4 ft 4 in) but doctors used the original 1835 descriptions to estimate she would have stood about 1.50 m (4 ft 11 in).

In 2000, Lone Hvass of the Elsinore Museum, Miranda Aldhouse-Green of Cardiff University, and the Department of Forensic Science at the University of Århus performed a re-examination of the Haraldskær Woman. Forensic analysis revealed stomach contents of unhusked millet and blackberries. Her neck had a faint groove as if someone applied a rope for torture or strangulation. The scientists concluded bog acids caused the swelling of the knee joint and that the woman was probably already dead before the branches pinned her down. Because of her careful placement, and since cremation was the prevailing mode of interment during that period in Jutland, the examiners determined the Haraldskær Woman was a victim of ritual sacrifice.

A case of mistaken identity was perhaps the best thing to ever happen to Haraldskær Woman (at least, in her postmortem life). When she was first discovered, she was believed to be the 10th-century Norwegian Queen Gunnhild, who (according to an Old Norse saga) was ordered bog-drowned by Danish King Harald Bluetooth. Soon after her discovery, Danish royalty had a sarcophagus crafted specifically to house her, and this V.I.P. treatment likely has contributed to her excellent state of preservation (minus some drying and shrinking) today, nearly 200 years after her discovery. (Later research revealed that Haraldskær Woman was not Gunnhild, but actually much older, living during the Iron Age in about 490 B.C.) 

Not all bog bodies have been as lucky in their conservation. For instance, Tollund Man: he’s pretty much gone now, except for his head. Alas, poor Tollund Man.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Archaeology-writer Heather Pringle has a great blog. You should probably check it out. She posted an interesting article on the probable fate of Europe’s still-undiscovered bog bodies:

All across Europe,  companies are excavating,  mining and draining bogs.  Land developers, for example, are keen to reclaim wetlands for new housing developments.  And gardeners love to spread peat on their flower beds.   All those big plastic bags of peat you see in European plant nurseries come from once great bogs and wetlands.

I learned something interesting, too, about how the famous Weerdinge men (above) were treated after their discovery in 1904:

in a time long before modern forensic science, the local constabulary decided to transfer the soggy cadavers to the nearest morgue in a very peculiar  fashion.

They rolled up the bodies of the two men like human scrolls, wrung them out, and stuffed them into what Wijnand van der Sanden, the provincial archaeologist in Drenthe and the author of Through Nature to Eternity: The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe, describes as a “starch box.”

Poor guys.

Tollund Man (ca. 400 B.C.) is a bog body superstar. He was found in 1950 in Denmark. He was so well preserved that his discoverers thought he was a modern murder victim. More from Wikipedia:

On the initial autopsy report in 1950, doctors concluded that Tollund Man died by hanging rather than strangulation. The rope left visible furrows in the skin beneath his chin and at the sides of his neck. There was no mark, however, at the back of the neck where the knot of the noose would have been located. After a re-examination in 2002, forensic scientists found further evidence to support these initial findings. Although the cervical vertebrae were undamaged (as they often are in hanging victims), radiography showed that the tongue was distended—an indication of death by hanging.

The stomach and intestines were examined and tests carried out on their contents. The scientists discovered that the man’s last meal had been a kind of porridge made from vegetables and seeds, both cultivated and wild: Barley, linseed, gold of pleasure (Camelina sativa), knotweed, bristlegrass, and chamomile.

There were no traces of meat in the man’s digestive system, and from the stage of digestion it was apparent that the man had lived for 12 to 24 hours after this last meal. In other words, he may not have eaten for up to a day before his death. Although similar vegetable soups were not unusual for people of this time, two interesting things were noted:

• The soup contained many different kinds of wild and cultivated seeds. Because these seeds were not readily available, it is likely that some of them were gathered deliberately for a special occasion.
• The soup was made from seeds only available near the spring where he was found.

PBS/NOVA has an interactive guide to Tollund Man. Worth checking out.

Image Source: Wikipedia.

Meet Red Franz. He’s a bog body from Bourtanger Moor in Germany, named for the color of his flagrant hair, beard, and eyebrows. He lived some time between 200 and 400 A.D. His hair wasn’t red in real life; likely, the reddening was caused by the acids in the peat where he hung out for so long.

According to Archaeology magazine, he was quite the horseman:

After he was moved to a local museum, scientists examined Franz and discovered “rider’s facets” on his thigh bones, protrusions caused by increased use of the muscles and connective tissues in the hip, which can occur from constant horseback riding. They also found that he had a long-healed injury to his upper arm, possibly caused by an arrowhead, and a broken (and healed) collarbone, both of which he survived for a long time before his execution. Museum curators only detected the actual cause of Franz’s death, when, after decades of being displayed on his back, they turned him over onto his abdomen and saw evidence of a deep gash in his throat, still visible in the remaining soft tissue of the back of his neck and shoulders.

Image Source: Canadian Museum of Civilization.

This is the Windeby bog body. From National Geographic’s great bog body slide show:

Recent analysis of the remains of Windeby “girl,” along with preliminary DNA tests, showed that she was probably a boy. The body’s hair, once thought to have been shaved to mark a young woman as an adultress, may have been scraped off by archaeologists’ trowels. The band of cloth around the face, at first interpreted as a gag or blindfold used during torture, is now seen as simply a means to cover the eyes of the dead. Dressed in a fur-trimmed leather cape, the boy was buried in a bog in northern Germany. 

The Wikipedia entry on the Windeby boy (where I took the image above) shows a facial reconstruction. It’s not far off from Chloe Sevigny.

PBS on Osterby Man and his fabulous hair:

Only his decapitated head was found, wrapped in a deerskin cape. He was likely killed by a blow to his left temple before he was decapitated. His hair, reddened by chemicals in the peat, is tied in an elaborate hairstyle called a Swabian knot. The Roman historian Tacitus, who lived in Osterby Man’s era, describes the hairstyle as typical of the Suebi tribe of Germany.

He’s also known as the Osterby Head, which I think is a little impersonal; don’t you?

This is the second of many posts about bog bodies, I’m sure. When I was about 14, I found a book at the library, The Bog People, and I read it like three times and pored endlessly over the pictures. I even brought the book to school with me. I was not popular.

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