The Wrong Half of a Body

APeat bogs keep the wrong half of a body. Where a grave cut in dry soil leaves a skeleton and almost nothing else, a northern European bog will surrender skin, hair, fingernails and the last meal still lying in the gut, while the bones inside have gone soft or dissolved altogether. Over nineteen hundred human remains have been logged from the peatlands of Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and the British Isles, and although the finds run from the Neolithic to the eighteenth century, a striking cluster falls between about 500 BCE and 100 CE. The faces from that cluster are what draw crowds to museum cases, and they are also the reason the subject has been argued over for a century. A preserved face invites the question of how its owner died; the difficulty is that a bog answers that question far more readily than it answers the question of why.

BThe preservation is a chemical accident with narrow terms. Sphagnum moss, the plant that builds a raised bog, releases a polysaccharide known as sphagnan, which locks up the nitrogen that bacteria need and tans the skin much as vegetable tannins tan a hide. The same moss acidifies the water it grows in, where readings of pH 3.8 are ordinary, and the wet peat below holds almost no oxygen. Bone fares badly in exactly those conditions, because the acid strips out the calcium phosphate that gives the tissue its hardness, and a body may therefore leave a complete hide and hardly a rib. But the recipe works only if the corpse enters the water in the cold half of the year and is covered within a day or so, since above about four degrees the gut bacteria have time to do their work before the sphagnan reaches them. Bodies committed to a bog in July, on the current understanding, simply did not survive to be found.

CIngrid Halvorsen has spent thirty years arguing that the Iron Age cluster records a deliberate religious practice. In a survey of the forty-one best-preserved individuals from Jutland and Schleswig she found injuries on thirty-three, and on nineteen of those the injuries were of more than one kind: a cut throat and a broken skull, or strangulation followed by stabbing. Killing of that sort, she maintains, is wasteful unless the manner of death is itself the point. She adds two further patterns. The bodies carry no grave goods to speak of, although the same communities buried their cremated dead in urns with brooches and combs; and the deposition sites, mapped against pollen evidence for cleared ground, sit on the wet margins between blocks of settled land rather than beside the settlements themselves. A bog, on her reading, was a threshold, and what was put into it was put there to cross over.

DPeter Lindqvist accepts the catalogue of injuries and disputes what may be read from it. Peat is not a neutral medium: it shifts, compresses and splits, and it has been cut for fuel with spades for centuries and with machinery since the 1960s, so that a proportion of the fractures on any bog body were inflicted long after death. A cord around a neck may be a ligature, or it may be a necklace of the ordinary kind. His central objection, though, is about sampling. Bogs preserve only the people who were put into bogs, and the ordinary dead of the same centuries have left next to nothing behind, so there is no comparison group against which the bog population can be judged unusual. He notes that classical writers describe northern peoples drowning wrongdoers in fens, and suggests that judicial killing, being untidy, repeated and in need of no theology, accounts for the evidence at least as economically as ritual does.

ETwo laboratory techniques have since been turned on the problem. Strontium ratios locked into tooth enamel record the geology of the district in which a person spent childhood, and at Vejmose in central Jutland four of the nine individuals tested had grown up somewhere other than the ground in which they were laid. Radiocarbon dating of the same nine spread their deaths across roughly eight centuries, from the sixth century BCE to the second century CE. Halvorsen treats the pairing as decisive: a single pool used again and again over such a span, and used for people brought in from elsewhere, is an institution rather than an accident. Lindqvist replies that a place of execution is also an institution, and that outsiders are precisely the people a community is most willing to punish. On the stomach contents the two are further apart than they look. The gruels recovered are heavy in weed seeds; Halvorsen reads a prescribed meal, Lindqvist a poor one.

FMeanwhile the archive is draining away. Peatlands have been ditched for pasture and stripped for horticulture across the whole northern range, and where a bog dries the oxygen returns and the chemistry runs backwards. One recent survey put the proportion of Denmark's raised bogs still wet enough to hold organic remains at under a fifth of the number mapped at the start of the twentieth century. Conservation bodies now press for rewetting on climate grounds, and the archaeological benefit rides along behind. It is tempting to treat the two readings of the bodies as rival answers awaiting some decisive find, but the opposition may belong more to us than to the Iron Age. A society that drowned a thief in a pool it believed a god inhabited was not choosing between punishment and sacrifice; it was doing one thing, and it is our filing system, not its own, that insists the act must go in one drawer or the other.