Making Bog Bodies Dull
14th April 2025
It takes an academic to do it, but it can be done. I filled my Buzzword Bingo card twice in the abstract alone.
Before people start looking to see if the blog has been hacked, allow me to back up a little bit. Many years ago, I found a book on my parents’ shelves entitled “The Bog People” by someone named Glob. He was one of the first archaeologists/anthropologists to write about the bodies found in bogs in Northern Europe. He also led the first professional excavation of the tanned remains of humans that turned up when people were digging peat and other things in swampy areas. The book had flaws, and leaned a little too much on Tacitus and other written sources, but someone had to start somewhere. It remains the foundational text on the topic. The idea stuck, and I’ve actually gotten to see four of the sets of remains. They are fascinating, if rather disconcerting, somewhat like Ötzi (the body from the ice).
I‘m revisiting the topic for various reasons, and working my way through a set of academic papers about wetland sacrifices and bog bodies and so on. Some are quite useful, some rather thought provoking (why do so many of the water sacrifices in Denmark also have lots of small, pale stones on or near the offerings?). And then there’s the one about posthuman theories of othering bodies, and bringing different theoretical frameworks about non-human nature, animal-human transferrences, and so on to the archaeology and anthropology of wetland sacrifices. Once I waded into the paper (pun fully intended), there were no surprises, just long words for concepts I already knew, written in a very dull, jargon-laced way. Gee, people back then decided that some humans weren’t fully people, and so could be abused and sacrificed. Or they could be included in burials against their will, as servants/slaves for the dead (and probably as ways to propitiate the dead and hurry them to the ancestors, in some cases). And sometimes animals stood in for humans as ritual offerings, but a few times it might have been the reverse. Cultures viewed outsiders and people with obvious differences as being inferior, perhaps. Gee.