‘The Dark Secrets of the Bog Bodies’, (Eamonn P. (Ned) Kelly interviewed by Diana Bentley),Minerva: The International Review of Ancient Art & Archaeology, March/April 2015, 34-37. (original) (raw)
An Archaeological Interpretation of Irish Iron Age Bog Bodies.
In S. Ralph (ed.), The archaeology of violence: interdisciplinary approaches. The Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology Distinguished Monograph Series 2, State University of New York Press, 232–40., 2012
In 2003, the discovery in Irish peat bogs of two well-preserved Iron Age bodies provided an opportunity to undertake detailed scientific analysis with a view to understanding how, when, and why the two young male victims were killed and their bodies consigned to the bogs. Research also looked at other Iron Age objects deposited ritually in peat bogs, including other bog bodies. The locations at which the bodies were discovered were researched and a wealth of historical, folklore, and mythological material was consulted to assist interpretation of the finds. A theory was developed that appears to explain not only the ritual killings in question but also the deposition of bog bodies and other objects in peat bogs in proximity to significant territorial boundaries. The theory links the bog bodies with kingship and sovereignty rituals during the Iron Age.
Bog Bodies: Representing the Dead
2006
Introduction-Bog Bodies: introducing the phenomenon When the teeth of the digger bucket bit into the ditch vegetation at the edge of Croghan bog in County Offaly, Larry Corley noticed something solid sticking out of the cleaned drain. Jumping out of his cab, and bending down, he was shocked to find it was a human arm, ending in a huge thumb (Grice 2006: 19). He reported it immediately to the local Gardaí, and Det. Sgt. Eadaoín Campbell was sent out to photograph the remains and launch a forensic investigation, in the company of Marie Cassidy, the Irish state pathologist. To the modern eye, bogs can be desolate places: bleak landscapes, with dark pools of water, fringed with cotton grass. Both Campbell and Cassidy were aware of the disappearance of several local women from the area, over the last few years (ibid). Bogs were also a favoured place to dispose of bodies during the 1970s and 1980s period of the Troubles (Farrell 2001). Both the atmosphere of the place, and these historical disappearances, gave them to fear they were dealing with a modern murder. What they found, however, when they pulled back the black plastic over the crime scene, was the leather-coloured corpse of a much older victim, who has since become known as 'Oldcroghan man' (Grice 2006: 20). The circumstances of this discovery were not unique. In 1983, Andy Mould, working on the processing line at Lindow Moss, in Cheshire, identified the partial remains of a human skull amongst the milled peat. Again, the police were called in, since they were concerned about the disappearance of a local woman from the area-Malika Reyn-Bardt-nearly twenty years earlier (Turner 1995b: 13). They had long suspected the husband, and when they confronted him with the remains, he confessed immediately to her murder and burial in the bog at the back of their bungalow: Lindow Moss. It was only after this interview that radiocarbon analysis was conducted on the remains, which dated them to the first or second century AD: Mr Reyn-Bardt had confessed to a murder he couldn't have possibly committed. Human remains from bogs across northern Europe have been dated to periods from later prehistory up to the nineteenth century. For example, when Graubelle Man was found in Denmark, there was debate over whether the remains were those of a local peat-cutter, Red Christian, who had disappeared in the region around 1887. Apparently found of his drink, it had long been assumed he had fallen into the bog, and drowned (Glob 1969: 60). Such a fate had also befallen two Cheshire men, 'Nat Bell, and Radcliffe' who in 1853, had returned home across Lindow Moss, apparently 'loaded with ale' and had drowned in the bog before morning (Worthington-Barlow 1853: 45 cited in Turner 1995b: 10). Meanwhile, in 1758, Thomas Wormald, vicar of Hope in Derbyshire, recorded that the remains of a couple who had died crossing the
Bog Bodies from Scotland: Old Finds, New Records
Journal of Wetland Archaeology, 2011
Book Reviews edited by Anthony Harding Altes Holz in neuem Licht: archäologische und dendrochronologische Untersuchungen an spätneolithischen Feuchtbodensiedlungen in Oberschwaben by Niels Bleicher, reviewed by A. Whittle
Journal of Archaeological Science, 2020
Since the 18 th century, the peat bogs of Northern Europe have yielded the remains of hundreds of people dating from as far back as c. 8.000 BC. While the individuals with preserved soft tissue have been subjected to numerous and comprehensive studies, the less famous bog skeletons have received much less attention, even though the distinction is essentially attributable solely to differences in preservation conditions. The objective of this study is to fill this gap by providing valuable information on ten bog skeletons from the small region of Vesthimmerland in northwest Denmark. The large majority (nine out of ten) of these finds are previously unpublished. We.apply a cross-disciplinary approach consisting of osteological and paleopathological investigations combined with radiocarbon and strontium isotope analyses. Our radiocarbon results show that two of the ten bog skeletons (two adult females) date to the Nordic Neolithic Age, one 8-year old child dates to the Nordic Bronze Age, while the majority are from the Pre-Roman Iron Age and Roman Iron Age (one child, four adult females and two adult males). Anthropological examination suggested no evidence of peri-mortem violence, but the finding of gross pathologies in two individuals could hint at deliberate deposition in the bog. Nine individuals yielded strontium isotopic values suggesting a local origin, whereas a female dating to the Pre-Roman Iron Age yielded highly radiogenic signatures suggesting a non-local origin. These results represent the first cross-disciplinary study of numerous bog skeletons adding much needed information to a neglected group of individuals, shedding new light on the different theories for the deposition of human remains in bogs in prehistoric times.
Bog Bodies: Archaeological Narratives and Modern Identity
Lindow Man, the British Bog Body discovered in 1984, and the Danish examples Tollund and Grauballe Men, discovered in 1950 and 1952, represent quite literally the violent face of a confrontational past. But what exactly do the archaeological narratives say? When presented with the forensic evidence can we explicitly conclude they were murdered as human sacrifices to appease the Germanic and Celtic gods and goddesses during times of affliction? Or are they simply an example of our own imposition of modern assumptions onto the past in a flare of sensationalism and mystical dramatization of the tumultuous affairs of noble savages? How have these narratives played out in the public sphere, particularly museum and heritage, and in modern culture such as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s bog poems. Do they reinforce harmful myths of an excessively violent past dominated by innately uncivilized natives? Who does the past really belong to and who has the authority to voice it? Many facets of b...
The extensive bog excavations and draining of swamps in the 19th and 20th centuries exposed one of the most sensational groups of finds ever discovered in Danish archaeology, the bog bodies. The reason that people were given their final resting place in the bog was not because of one single tradition or one single ritual. In the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, some were due to accidents and others to murder. Some may have been sacrificed and others may have died of natural causes and were buried in the bog.
2008
This essay is about bog bodies – the preserved remains of prehistoric humans, often interpreted as ritual killings, found in peat bogs across northwest Europe. It considers the production of knowledge about the human past as a complex, relational process implicating multiple actors and traversing the terms of any straightforward nature-culture binary. It argues that theorizations of collective memory – and in particular of its ‘collective’ aspect need to pay closer attention, both to the role of non-human agencies in the shaping of humanly intelligible artefacts and histories and to the relationship between preservation and transformation as a constitutive feature of collective memory. By way of illustration, it traces in some detail the story of one particular bog body, from death and deposition in the ground through rediscovery, excavation, archaeological analysis and subsequent public display. DOI: 10.3176/tr.2008.3.05
Journal of …, 2009
In 2003, the remains of an Early Iron Age bog body, known as 'Oldcroghan Man', were recovered during the cutting of a drainage ditch in a bog in the Irish Midlands. Only some fingernails and a withe fragment remained undisturbed in situ in the drain face, providing the sole evidence for the original position of the body. A detailed reconstruction of the depositional context of the body has been undertaken through multi-proxy analyses of a peat monolith collected at the findspot. The palynological record shows that the surrounding area was the focus of intensive human activity during the Later Bronze Age, but was largely abandoned during the Bronze Age-Iron transition in the mid-first millennium BC. In the mid-4th century BC, a bog pool developed at the site, evidenced in the stratigraphic, plant macrofossil, testate amoebae and coleopteran records. Plant macrofossil and pollen analysis of peat samples associated with the fingernails suggests that the body was deposited in this pool most likely during the 3rd century BC. The absence of carrion beetle fauna points to complete submergence of the body within the pool. Deposition occurred shortly before or around the time that the surrounding area again became the focus of woodland clearance, as seen in the extended pollen record from the peat monolith. This period corresponds to the Early Iron Age in Ireland, during which renewed cultural connections with Britain and continental Europe can be seen in the archaeological record and widespread forest clearance is recorded in pollen records from across Ireland. The palaeoenvironmental results indicate, therefore, that the demise of Oldcroghan Man took place at a pivotal time of socio-economic and perhaps political change.
Bog Bodies in Context: Developing a Best Practice Approach
European Journal of Archaeology, 2019
Bog bodies are among the best-known archaeological finds worldwide. Much of the work on these often extremely well-preserved human remains has focused on forensics, whereas the environmental setting of the finds has been largely overlooked. This applies to both the ‘physical’ and ‘cultural’ landscape and constitutes a significant problem since the vast spatial and temporal scales over which the practice appeared demonstrate that contextual assessments are of the utmost importance for our explanatory frameworks. In this article we develop best practice guidelines for the contextual analysis of bog bodies, after assessing the current state of research and presenting the results of three recent case studies including the well-known finds of Lindow Man in the United Kingdom, Bjældskovdal (Tollund Man and Elling Woman) in Denmark, and Yde Girl in the Netherlands. Three spatial and chronological scales are distinguished and linked to specific research questions and methods. This provides a basis for further discussion and a starting point for developing approaches to bog body finds and future discoveries, while facilitating and optimizing the re-analysis of previous studies, making it possible to compare deposition sites across time and space.
Yearbook of Mummy Studies, Volume 1
This paper reports not on the results of two sets of experimental burials of juvenile pig corpses in raised bog peat, but on the lessons learned from the research in terms of methodology and validity of this type of research for the interpretation of human peat bog bodies from northwestern Europe. The first project, conducted in the mid-1990s in three peat bogs in England and Wales, involved the immersion of more than ten piglets in raised bog peat from periods ranging from six months to three years, with limited environmental monitoring. Analyses of these specimens consisted primarily of necropsy, radiography (X-ray), scanning electron microscopy of teeth and microCT of bone. The second project, conducted in 2008 and still in progress, involved three piglets in raised bog peat in Ireland for a period of 19 months (as of March 2009), with no environmental monitoring. The purpose of this project was to replicate, as much as possible, bog body skin in order to determine their feasibility in experimental conservation procedures for long term preservation of bog bodies. Analyses of the specimens will include radiology (CT), necropsy and histology.
Bog bodies, ritual violence and non places
Bog bodies, ritual violence, and non-places. In: Harald Meller, Roberto Risch, Kurt W. Alt, François Bertemes u. Rafael Micó (Hrsg.), Rituelle Gewalt – Rituale der Gewalt/Ritual Violence – Rituals of Violence. Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle 22 (Halle/Saale 2020) 379–394.
Bog bodies have always attracted public interest; the lifelike preservation of the dead, but also the traces of excessive violence on the corpses or their, from today's point of view, strange treatment, make the bog bodies a special and, in a broader context, irregular group of finds. Due to numerous unobjective contributions, bog body research has been discredited, so that it has been marginalised in the scientific discourse. On the basis of recent investigations, earlier interpretations can be corrected and new insights can be gained. However, a generally accepted interpretation of the bog bodies has not yet been achieved. A critical analysis of bog body depositions shows parallels to contemporary sacrificial practices, but also to a fear of death that is evident in regular burials. The bog corpses reveal an extraordinary ritualised violence, which finds its closest parallels in the contemporary Scandinavian war booty sacrifices. Human sacrifice is the exception rather than the rule in Iron Age societies in north-western Europe. It is an extreme form of sacrifice that also required special ritual precautions against both the rejection of the sacrifice and the reappearance of the dead.
Irish Late Prehistoric Burials Volume I (of III Volumes)
PhD Thesis, UCD, Dublin., 2008
This is a study of the treatment of the dead during Irish late prehistory. It concerns what was done to the body prior to burial, how and where it was buried, what was buried with it, and who was buried. It also explores possible causes for diachronic developments and possible reasons for the general scarcity of burials from this period.