In 1983, police in Macclesfield, located in Cheshire, England, were investigating reports that a man named Peter Reyn-Bardt had murdered his wife, Malika, 23 years earlier. Some time before, he'd apparently boasted that he had killed her, dismembered her and buried her body in the back yard, yet when interviewed, he denied the accusations. The case stalled as police found no physical evidence against him. However, by some chance, Mr. Reyn-Bardt's back yard opened on to what had become a peat company's extraction site. On May 13, men working on the peat elevator discovered a well-preserved skull which the forensic pathologist identified as a 30 to 50-year-old European female. When confronted with this discovery, Mr. Reyn-Bardt confessed to the murder. Police continued their investigation in the peat, and decided to involve Oxford University's Research Laboratory for Archaeology. Just before the Reyn-Bardt case went to trial, Oxford came forward with a date for the skull-they had found it to be 1660-1820 years old....
Stories such as this-of ancient, yet amazingly well-preserved bodies and artifacts being found in European bogs-have intrigued people for many years, yet have failed to spur many large-scale archaeological investigations. The Lindow bodies (the first being the "female" skull that inspired Peter Reyn-Bardt's confession), are often thought of, by the public, as the first of such finds. However, the first recorded bog find, that of the Kibbelgaarn body in the Netherlands, occurred almost a century earlier in 1791. As early as this may seem, bodies were undoubtedly discovered even before then, by the first people to cut peat from the bogs for fuel; unfortunately, as there is no mention of them in the literature of that period, we know nothing of these finds.
As it stands today, hundreds of bodies have reportedly been recovered from bogs throughout Europe. But what exactly is a bog and how are bodies discovered in this environment different from human remains discovered at dry archaeological sites?
Bogs are areas of soft, waterlogged land, usually containing large amounts of organic acids and aldehydes in layers of Sphagnum and peat. This environment often acts to preserve the soft tissues of a cadaver even after the bones have dissolved away; such things as skin, eyes, intestines, brains and hair are sometimes so well preserved as to appear almost modern. Bog finds such as this then supplement the fossil record which tends to preserve only hard bone and stone. Thus far, bodies found in the bogs have been dated from the Mesolithic to modern times; the best preserved and most celebrated have come from dates throughout the Iron Age and Roman periods. Their presence seems to be a result of a whole range of causes-inhumation, accidental death, murder and ritual. Each country or region, with its separate bog environment, lends itself to a different range of archaeological finds:
England/Wales:
Nearly any kind of bog environment imaginable can be found in England. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that many important discoveries of all different states of preservation have been made here. In Prestatyn, for example, searchers found the remains of a late Iron Age infant burial marked by an oval fence of eight oak stakes. In Lancashire, a bog which destroyed almost all of the human remains in a wooden coffin for some reason perfectly preserved quantities of hair, fingernails, three feathers and a woolen shroud. From the lowland raised mires scattered throughout the country came the famous Worsley and Lindow men among many others; these two finds in particular have peaked public interest because of the apparent evidence for brutal deaths including hanging or nooses. The Fenland peats, which encompass Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk Fenland have produced a rich array of skeletal finds, including animal remains, and late Bronze Age metalwork, including over 300 pins, rings, ornaments, and weapons.
Scotland:
The potentially earliest finds in Scotland were made in 1830 and were said to have included Bronze Age metalwork; however, evidence of these discoveries no longer exists. All other discoveries made since then have been medieval or post-medieval in date. Most bodies were apparently victims of some sort of epidemic or natural disaster; for example, at Bressay, Shetland, where twelve bodies were discovered, cause of death seems to be some sort of shipwreck. Other bodies appear to be murder victims, judging from evidence of blows to the head or mutilations. Aside from actual human remains, many artifacts have also been discovered here; in Rogart, Sutherland, searchers discovered and conserved a tunic, stockings and primitive shoes-one of the earliest complete costumes recovered from any bog body.
Ireland:
As many as 100 individuals may have been discovered in both the raised and blanket bogs of Ireland. Seven of these have been radiocarbon dated. Although several date to late prehistoric times, it is obvious that the majority of Irish bog bodies are of Medieval or more recent times. Many of these bodies exhibit characteristics of deliberate, ritual burials. For example, in the Gallagh burial, a man was found lying on his back with two pointed stakes carefully positioned at either side of his body, while at the Derrymaquirck burial, remains of a female and infant were discovered, positioned with a block of wood at the woman's head and a large stone placed over the bones of her pelvic area.
Denmark:
Since the 1950s, when Tollund Man and Grauballe Man (pictured above) were found, no new bodies have been discovered in Denmark. However, as many as 500 bodies may have been discovered in Denmark's past. Therefore, modern researchers have been concentrating their efforts on studying older finds in great detail. People have long theorized that a majority of these bodies represent the remains of sacrificial victims or else punished individuals; many of the bodies were found without any indication of clothing or had oddly close-cropped hair; occasionally, evidence such as bits of rope or unhealed wounds suggested their lives had come to a violent end.
Germany:
In A. Dieck's Die europaischen Moorleichenfunde (The European Bog-Body Finds) half of the more than 1850 bodies cataloged had been found in Germany (Dieck 1986). More have been found since that book's publication, yet the same drawback observed with respect to Danish bog bodies applies to these German bodies as well; no well documented survey describes or analyses all of the find reports collected by people such as Dieck. None of the bodies have been radiocarbon dated-the dates we have are all based on often unreliable pollen analysis. One of the more famous finds is that of Datgen Man in 1959. Datgen Man's head was found several meters away from his body; the body showed stab wounds as well as other injuries and had been pegged down into the bog with stakes. Since this site is void of other sacrificial contexts such as animal bones, scientists are puzzled over its meaning.
Netherlands:
In the western Netherlands, the few raised bogs remaining today are now carefully protected nature reserves (these represent only around 1% of the original bog land), so no archaeological evidence has been recently harvested from these areas. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reports began flooding in about hundreds of discoveries made in the northern bog country. 100 years ago, the Drents Museum in Assen acquired its first bog body and since then twelve more bodies have been put into the museum's care, most recently in 1986. In 1987, the museum began a project for the systematic research of bog bodies-the kind of program so desperately needed in places like Denmark and Germany. The results of this research are discussed in seven publications (van der Sanden (ed.) 1990,1992,1993,1994; van der Sanden, Haverkort and Pasveer 1991/1992; Evershed 1990; Osinga, Buys and van der Sanden 1992). In part due to this careful system of study and conservation, hordes of information have been gathered about these Dutch bodies; scientists have been able to draw conclusions about their stature, diet, hair, diseases, DNA, sex, age, clothing and cause of death.
Due in part to the uncertain record of bog findings throughout the centuries, as well as to the difficulty scientists have had trying to conserve bog bodies, it has been hard to make many explicit assumptions about them. Even ignoring technical matters or scientific details, an air of mystery surrounds these preserved bodies. What can they tell us about ancient people's cultural practices or superstitions? Were they ritually deposited in the bogs, or did this sample just happen to be well preserved because of the anaerobic environment while other bodies, deposited elsewhere in the European climate, decayed long ago? As mentioned earlier, the evidence found on some bodies seems to clearly point to death by unnatural causes-bodies found with nooses around their necks or various mutilations. However, it is always important to consider alternative explanations as to how bodies could have acquired such distinguishing attributes. For example, a body of a young person with a "noose" around it's neck may tell of a mother's last desperate attempt to save her sinking child by lasooing its neck instead of indicating gruesome murder. Likewise, heads found detached from their bodies need not evidence decapitation; instead, the sinews of the neck may have weakened and broken as the body was exposed to various conditions over time. Although we may enjoy fabricating exciting histories for bodies found under mysterious circumstances between the layers of peat and moss in European bogs, we mustn't let assumptions take the place of scientific fact. As R.C. Turner says in his article, The Lindow Man Phenomenon: Ancient and Modern:
"No single explanation is sufficient to explain the bog-body phenomenon.... Perhaps the explanations offered tell more about the explainer than the phenomenon itself."