Bog Bodies

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Welcome to this latest episode of the Ancients, and we are talking all the things bog bodies.

These bodies preserved in wetlands for thousands of years, each with their own amazing, gruesome story to tell.

And that's what I really loved about this topic.

It's the fact that every bog body has a different story to tell, and it's the job of archaeologists to explore the evidence we have surviving alongside the body, including the body itself, to try try and figure out what happened to this individual.

It's a real great kind of mystery-solving topic of prehistory.

I really do hope you enjoy it.

Our guest is fantastic, the one and only Professor Melanie Giles from the University of Manchester.

Mel, I've had the pleasure of working with her on a documentary recently.

She's a wonderful person and a brilliant storyteller.

I really do hope you enjoy.

Let's go.

They're some of the most striking human remains from history.

Well-preserved bodies dug out of the great bogs that span northern Europe, many dating to ancient times.

Tollandman, Lindoman, Old Krochenman.

Just a few of the most famous examples.

Their stories give us a window into a prehistoric world of murder, sacrifice, crime and punishment.

A world where death and the supernatural loomed large over life.

Frozen in time, these prehistoric cold cases have fascinated people for millennia.

From the Roman historian Tacitus to the famous Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote several poems about bog bodies.

With new discoveries continuing to be made and advances in science, now more than ever before, archaeologists are able to piece together the stories of these ancient individuals, how they lived and how they died.

This is the story of bog bodies with our guest, Professor Melanie Giles.

Mel, it is great to see you again and it's wonderful to have you on the podcast.

Oh, it's my pleasure to be here.

And to talk all things bog bodies, now is it fair to say there's nothing quite like looking at a bog body, literally a face from the prehistoric past?

Yes, I think for me as an Iron Age archaeologist, it is that feeling that you are literally looking into the face of somebody from 2,000, 2,500 years ago, which makes me feel that they have stories to tell that can't be told through other remains.

And I find them fascinating for many different reasons.

Now, to kick it all off, what exactly do we mean by a bog body?

So when a set of human remains enters an environment that is largely formed of peat, something magical begins to happen.

First of all these are very cold environments and by and large so whether we're talking about a raised bog, a blanket bog which people will be familiar with from the landscapes of Scotland and the Highlands or the Peak District.

or the fenlands in fact of the east coast of Britain.

These are really special environments where decay really is halted, it's slowed down and a process of preservation begins.

Now some of those environments are acidic, the raised bogs for example and the blanket bogs and that means that the normal things that begin to decay fast like skin and hair and nails they don't decay whereas the bone is less well preserved.

And so we end up with this quite magical and sometimes kind of like quite shocking effect of a body being better preserved than when it goes into a normal dry

grave or you know kind of a soil of a different type where those elements decay quite fast and what we're left with is the bones.

So it's almost the reverse process of what we see in most archaeological discoveries.

So is it the case that bodies buried in peat in a bog they're completely locked away, sealed away from oxygen so that it is anaerobic conditions which allows for this?

Yeah, so the oxygen excluded, but also the processes that normally make a body decay, the kind of bacterial decomposition, which really comes from within our own bodies, that's what's happening.

And also the arrival of all sorts of insect life that begins to exacerbate decay.

None of that happens.

The body is locked away and decay just doesn't commence.

But also something magical is going on really in terms of a chemical reaction between the sphagnic acids of the peatlands and any organic matter that enters into its cold oxygen-excluding depths.

And we see this kind of tanning reaction where skin and hair takes on the peat brown hue of the decaying plant matter which forms our peat.

And this results in that leathery appearance of many of the bob bodies found across northwestern Europe.

And that blackish appearance as well, is it?

That's why you see that common colour, whether you're in Denmark or Scotland or Ireland, I'm guessing.

That's right.

And it also has the effects on hair of turning it a slightly reddish brown colour.

So many of our bog bodies have a common appearance, apart from those that are in the more alkaline fen environments, where actually we don't see that marvellous preservation of skin and tissue.

And we do see kind of skeletonised remains.

And archaeologists recently have been saying these are all bog bodies they all go into bogs and fens so we need to include the really well-preserved ones along with the slightly less well-preserved ones the intention was still the same to deposit these bodies in quite special landscape locales we're certainly going to explore all of that i must also ask because you mentioned earlier peat bogs when someone mentions peat i think of the old fuel resource that so many people used to use in their fires and so on.

I think less so now.

But does that correspond, does that correlate with when the most bog bodies were discovered, when there was most interest in gaining peat for fuel and fire and so on?

Yes, we've been we've been cutting peat bogs for fuel for as long as really, you know, the peat has existed.

So our earliest peat cuttings in the British Isles date to the Late Bronze Age.

There's a tiny little peat stack on the Isle of Barra that was dated to that Late Bronze Age era.

And by the time the Romans come along to places like the Netherlands, they are really puzzled by this.

They say, oh, these locals, they're really weird.

They're burning the earth.

And they don't understand, you know, they don't have the knowledge that local people have, that this is a really good fuel source that burns slowly and steadily.

It has a particular smell and a particular flavour, indeed, that actually

people now are quite romantic about.

They associate it with a, you know, kind of old ways of living.

And this is, you know, something that people look back on sometimes with fondness although of course you know now we know that burning peat is probably something that we shouldn't really do because it's re-releasing carbon into the atmosphere and as that peat cutting and peat digging really took off in the post-medieval period and particularly in the 18th 19th centuries of course the things hidden in its depths began to come back to light Because you can imagine early antiquarians,

if one of their workers stumbles across a bog body, I mean the surprise and the amazement that these early writers must have had seeing it back several centuries ago.

Yes, and many of our bog bodies only exist as what we call paper bog bodies.

We hear them written about or corresponded about in letters and journals and diaries.

Ancott's woman from Lincolnshire, for example, was found by a peat digger who was horrified by what he discovered, leapt out of the peat pit, but word reached a local antiquarian.

He summoned his gardeners and they went out to rescue parts of the bog body and garments, which would allow them to investigate them further.

But they respectfully buried her body within the chapel ground nearby.

And that, I think, tells us something interesting about this moment of discovery of bog bodies, that there is always this feeling that somehow you should do right by them, if you can.

And can you give us more of an idea of the context in which bog bodies are found?

So in what areas of northern Europe are we talking about where they're discovered and what time periods do they cover?

Well we find bog bodies really wherever we find peat, partly because peatlands are quite dangerous landscapes.

So some of the bog bodies we discover are people who've died by accident, in bad weather, by misfortune.

And the key areas within the British Isles are the Midlands of Ireland, the great large bog complexes there.

Scotland, of course, it's upland peatland blanket bogs.

North West Britain, Cheshire, Lancashire, the Pennines.

And then we've got the Fenland bodies along the east coast of places like Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and indeed Holdeness in East Yorkshire.

And then as we move into Europe, you're looking at places like Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, particularly, you know, a huge amount of that landscape is peatland, low-lying land.

But we also know we have bog bodies from Sweden and Norway, less well-known and often less well-preserved.

These are some of our skeletonized bog bodies.

And we have stories and folk tales from places like Estonia, which suggests that they too had a bog body tradition.

So we can, wherever we see those peatlands across northwestern Europe, often there are stories about bodies being found within their depths.

Well, I know you said northwestern Europe there, but then you also said Estonia.

So it feels like it's creeping further and further east as time goes on.

So who knows how much further east you will find bog bodies if future excavations are done into what is today Russia, I guess.

Yeah, yes, indeed, yes, yeah.

And of course, then by the time you're getting into the really cold areas, you know, we're dealing with things like permafrost, creating the same kind of extraordinary preservation of flesh and tissue.

And the time period for bog bodies, I mean, how many millennias roughly are we covering?

Well, because we have these accidental deaths.

When, you know, peat is really beginning to form in the early Holocene, but particularly there's there's a period when it grows at an exponential rate.

So in the kind of the Bronze Age, mid to late Bronze Age, through the Iron Age, peatlands are growing in extent and gobbling up the kind of productive land around their edges.

And as that plant matter decays and forms the solid areas of peat that we then cut for fuel, more and more things find their way into their depths.

So we have mesolithic remains that have been preserved by the peat, Neolithic, and we also have remains as late as, I think the latest known bog body that people accept as a set of bog body remains was an unfortunate young man who died in an aircraft.

He was a member of the Luftwaffe and he tried to make a soft landing on a peat bog in Denmark and unfortunately he didn't make it.

And his remains were only found when that bog was drained, I think, to become a golf course.

He was dressed in his flying leathers and he had become within the time in between, you know, effectively what we would regard as a bog body.

So they date from all periods, but there's a particular pulse, an intense pulse of when we find remains in bogs, which is the period I'm most interested in, which is the first millennium BC into the early centuries of the first millennium AD.

I mean, what I found so fascinating there was, first of all, the fact how

peat is a post-Ice Age phenomenon also, which is really interesting.

And this idea that it was growing, this idea that these prehistoric societies, let's say the area that you're most interested in, like the Iron Age,

they would have seen peat bogs nearby.

And then over time, maybe starting to recognize that the peat landscape was slowly growing and taking over the land that they were used to maybe farming for so long.

Absolutely.

And we can see that in places like the Cambridgeshire Fens, where we have Middle Bronze Age field systems that literally are swallowed up.

As the peat grows and expands out from the river systems, you know, they are losing productive land.

And my colleagues in Denmark, I think it's reckoned that around about a quarter of all productive farmland goes under the bog within the Iron Age.

And you can see, if you live in and around a peatland, you know, you can see it grow and swell in wet periods as its water content increases and shrink again in the summer months.

So we have this seasonal change.

But over generations, we have one antiquarian, that antiquarian who rushed out to find the remains of Amcott's woman.

He talks about a church steeple disappearing from view on the horizon as his local peat bog expands and grows.

And so the landmarks that he's known, you know, disappear.

So I think people were very aware that this was a different kind of landscape, a landscape with almost like an identity, power, an agency.

And it had to be interacted with it respectfully, dealt with.

Perhaps they were trying to hold back some of the changes that it was affecting on their farmland.

farmland.

I was trying to put a bog wall around it or something like that.

Well we'll certainly come back to this when we explore the importance of bogs to these prehistoric societies.

But I guess one other question I'd love to ask before exploring a particular example of a bog body is that they are still being discovered today.

I mean we have new discoveries of bog bodies down to 2025 when we're talking now.

Yes, the most recent one that we have in the British Isles is one from Northern Ireland, Banny McComb's model woman as she's become known.

And this is from the town next door to where Seamus Heaney grew up and these discoveries are being made because we still have domestic peat cutting.

You know we're living in a time of fuel crisis and traditional communities in you know the Scottish Islands, places in Ireland, you know still rely on peat as a source of domestic fuel even if the very large-scale industrial cutting is slowing down and in many places now ceasing.

And so things still come to light.

There's an additional dimension there in terms of the fact that these were landscapes where murders were hidden, you know, small-scale local murders, as bogs became places where people didn't go and they were less inhabited and less used, they were a good place to hide a body.

And unfortunately, that included some of the individuals who were murdered during the troubles in Northern Ireland.

So when Bally McComb's Moore woman was first found, it was immediately assumed that this was one of the IRA disappeared.

She proved that that was not the case, but we must be aware that some of our bog bodies are more recent than

most of the ones I'm interested in.

And that's where we need to work closely with the police.

And also a fact, isn't it, that some of the most famous examples are a certain bog body, then it has a man at the end or Lindo man, Tolland man.

But Mel, as you highlighted there, for the Iron Age cases, for the prehistoric cases, it is not just men who are bog bodies.

No, no, and I think that's where we have to turn to our wider knowledge of the Iron Age now.

We have some good ancient DNA and cemetery evidence coming out of places like Yorkshire that suggests that actually we're dealing with matrilineal societies in many regions.

Now, this isn't the same as matriarchal societies.

What it means is that inheritance, land rights, stock, portable wealth.

seems to go down the female line.

People are tracing their lineage through their mother, their grandmother, their great-grandmother.

That's probably quite sensible in communities, farming communities, where men may be away for certain portions of the year with stock, you know, on trade, engaging in conflict sometimes.

So actually the women become the stable line of the family lineage in that sense.

And certainly we have many burials in Iron Age Britain and Ireland that speak of female power and authority.

So I think we would be naive to think that all of our Bogbodies are male.

We have potent and powerful females who seem to have met with the same kind of fate as the men around them.

Yes, that will become especially important where we explore some of the potential explanations for these bog bodies and how it put the words ritual to sacrifice in there or formal burials and so on.

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If we go on now to a particular example, because I feel the amount of information we can get from an example really conveys just how much information people can gather from one of these bog bodies.

And I'm going to take you first of all to arguably, I think it's fair to say, the most famous of all of them across in Denmark, the story of Tolland Mann.

So, Mel, first of all, what is Tolland Mann?

So, Tolland Man is probably the best preserved bog body anywhere.

The reasons for that are complex.

First of all, he is marvellously preserved, or parts of his body are marvellously preserved.

So, even within a bog, the exact kind of temperature and acidic micro-environment can mean that some bits of the body are really, really well preserved.

His face, his head, his upper torso.

Wow.

And the face is just extraordinary.

It is very moving.

And there's a reason why he's on the front cover of my book on bog bodies.

And he is the kind of the image that people think of very often when they think of bog remains.

But the reason why he continues to be so characterful, if you like, and appears so full of life in death, is the marvellous conservation treatment that he was given on his discovery.

However, the rest of the body, when you visit him in Seekerberg, is a simulacrum.

It's a copy.

Because when he was found in Denmark, most museum curators didn't really feel it was appropriate to show human remains and they didn't think that they should preserve the whole body.

So he was decapitated, effectively, by the by the archaeologists oh it's not not so not a prehistoric decapitation this happened more recently this happened after he was discovered and the head and certain bits of the body were you know really carefully and very skillfully preserved conjuring this extraordinary feeling of being close to somebody from the iron age but the rest of the remains were treated in different ways some dried out some were stored in ethanol and other substances.

So he had a his body had a really checkered history.

What the museum, the archaeologist at the time who was responsible for the discovery, P.

V.

Globb, was furious about this.

He felt that the whole body should be respected, kept intact and preserved.

So the next discovery he made, Graubaleman, he didn't hang around.

He basically mobilised the public.

He got them to come and see Graubaleman.

And it was the public interest which demonstrated to the National Museum that this was, that they should change tact, that they they should alter their approach to these remains.

So what you see in Siekerberg now is a very respectful and skillful recreation of what the whole body looked like.

And they can only do that because of the extraordinary photography that was taken at the time.

And I think they're quite honest about that, and they've created a really moving encounter.

But it is his face that draws you in.

And you can't, I think you can't help but be stunned and in silence in his presence.

Well, it looks like he's sleeping, doesn't it?

And you you can see the lines on his face as well.

It's incredibly moving.

Was he buried with any grave goods or anything like that, or was he very much on his own?

So we have a beautiful little leather cap.

We have a belt, which, you know, why do you need a belt if you're not wearing trousers or

something like that?

But if they were made of linen, unfortunately, that wouldn't survive in the bog.

So flax products, unfortunately, are eaten away by the acid of the bog.

So my suspicion is that he probably did have some kind of clothing but we have lost that.

But the main thing that draws our attention to how he died is this extraordinary plaited hide noose around his neck.

And he seems to have died from hanging.

And this is a form of hanging not like our kind of formal British mode of death up until you know kind of the 1960s.

where we used the long drop hanging, which actually fractured your neck.

This is a hanging that causes death through through strangulation.

Is that the main sign of trauma that you see on the body or are there other signs of trauma as well?

What else do we think we know?

Yeah, so I think with Tolandman, that is intuited as the main cause of death.

Graubaliman is different.

There we have a very large wound to the throat.

You know, it is clear there, it's exanguination.

So the shedding of blood.

Of blood spilling, okay, right.

Before we kind of explore what potentially the reasons were behind his hanging, I'd like to ask a bit more about what scientific developments have revealed about the man himself.

I mean, have they been able to explore his remains to understand more about his diet or his health?

I mean, the food he ate and so on.

Yeah, so Tolland Man seems to be in fairly good health.

I think he has, you know, minor ailments that we would see as quite common in Iron Age folks.

So some osteoarthritis setting in, you know, many Iron Age people would have died in their early 20s.

He's a little bit older than that.

So it is testament to quite a good life up until that point.

Sometimes on Iron Age bodies, we see the kinds of malnutrition lines in the teeth where the laying down of your teeth enamel has been interrupted.

That can be caused by not enough food, so a time of famine, but it can also be caused by periods of childhood illness as

your adult teeth are forming.

And we don't see anything like that with Tolin Mann.

So as far as we can tell,

he's lived a good life and quite a healthy life.

But rather like Grabalaman, the stomach contents that were analysed by the environmental archaeologists tell of a rather, what we might regard as a poor last meal.

It's a kind of porridge of grains.

It's got some bits of weed species in there that might be there accidentally from the harvesting, or they might be in there as additives, you know, kind of little flavourings.

But this is, you know, what some people would see as famine food, kind of the leftover bits and quite a poor meal at the end of his life.

I was lucky enough to try a version of this when I went across to Siegfried.

I have to say, I found it quite tasty.

So I think sometimes we have to be careful about how we interpret those meals, because to us with a modern Western taste and diet, they might seem an ignoble or kind of, you know, poor last meal to people in the Iron Age, you know, to be given a meal.

to have that presented to you perhaps before a trial maybe that was an honour in itself and the community itself that he would have come from so we can therefore imagine a typical iron age community of the time one centered around agriculture and farming yes they live in longhouses whereas in britain we have roundhouses a little bit of a different kind of architecture but otherwise we're we're dealing with mixed farmers so they have livestock they have sheep they have cattle but they grow crops you know different communities have different attitudes towards things like fish and eel some of them eat them but you know in britain we're not very fond of that

So there are subtle differences, but otherwise we're looking at small-scale farming communities living in the kind of settlements that we would describe today as a kind of a, at the best, a kind of a village.

Most of them are hamlets.

Mel, I love the amount of information that people, archaeologists and scientists and so on, have been able to gather from Tolland Mann because it's just one example of many.

It's a symbol for the amount of information people can gather nowadays.

So we know about his last meal, his general health, you know, where he came from, the type of community he would have come from, and the evidence of trauma on his body, the probable hanging.

When you combine all of that information together, what do archaeologists think?

Actually, I mean, what do you think happened to Toland's man?

There's no doubt in his case, as with Grab Alleman and a number of others, that this is a sudden and violent death.

And actually, when you look at the whole range of bog bodies from this period, there are only a few, a very few, where we can be really certain about that.

So many people think that they're all violently killed and sacrificed.

But actually, signs of violent death are rare.

So where we have it, I think we need to pay close attention to it.

Death by hanging is, you know, a particular kind of death.

One of the roles of an archaeologist is to think about why a community might use that.

And I think, you know, in our community, we tend to think of that as a punishment.

Crime and punishment, yes, you do think, don't you?

And undoubtedly there must have been people in the past who committed crimes that the community considered were, you know, were enough to deprive them of their life.

So I don't want to dismiss the idea that this could be a punishment.

But

I think what we can say sensibly is that they had decided that he had to die.

And so then it becomes a question of how do you take a life?

And that can be for very different reasons.

So

these communities are what I would call exchange communities.

They're exchange societies.

They don't use money.

If you want to get something from a smith or a potter, you swap things, you exchange things, or you offer them things.

That might be hospitality.

That might be food.

That might be a sheep next year.

But the idea is that you don't get something without giving something back.

And so there is a possibility that what we're looking at here is a kind of exchange, kind of ritualized exchange, not between people, but between the communities of the living.

And

those are the forces, those are the presences in the world that make your life possible.

And so Tolenman is possibly a gift, a very special kind of gift to the gods, because in Denmark, alongside human remains in those bogs, we also find other extraordinary objects, cauldrons, you know, some of them, the Gundestrup cauldron, silver-plated, decorated with scenes of classic Celtic mythology.

We find meat offerings, pots full of food, bracelets, rings, weapons.

So other things are given up to the bog.

This seems to be the right place to make thanksgiving offerings if you've had good fortune and good luck.

propitiatory offerings if you are worried about appeasing the gods if something is going wrong and also making exchanges that perhaps secure their favour and good fortune in the future.

Now we will probably never be able to pin down the exact reasons why somebody feels a life has to be offered but this is where those ideas around sacrifice and ritual come from.

This is not just a bloodthirsty taking of a life.

This is the offering of a life I think in exchange for something else.

And is there any sense if let's say Toland Man was an example of like like an offering to the gods, and we're certainly going to explore more about that kind of bog context in a moment, is there any potential explanations as to why this figure in particular might have been chosen from the remains themselves?

Yeah, I mean, we have some classical author kind of texts that suggest that this could just be a question of...

of a bad lot.

You choose the short straw,

and

your turn is up.

When an offering has to be made, you know, they choose a figure from the society sometimes we can see in some of those bog bodies that have had a violent end there is something about them that that sets them apart physically so we have we have a just a few individuals who have either infections or trauma that seems to not be healing well or what we might call disfigurements disabilities that might have been seen very differently in the Iron Age world you know I think we have to be aware of our own cultural attitudes there either way some of these people stood apart because of what they looked like or what had happened to them in life but some of them must have stood apart because of their skills and we have to bear in mind that for most iron age communities we don't have a formal burial rite we people are exposed to the elements they expect upon death to be returned to the environment through the exposure of the body and its natural decay or being put into a river and passing downstream and being eaten by the fishes, effectively as a way of returning you to a great pot of fertility, the kind of the world of regeneration.

They may have had a strong belief in reincarnation, that this was one life and that they would return as something else and possibly non-human.

So I think if you don't see death as an end, you just see it as taking a step into another realm.

which I think is how they saw the bogs, a realm of the other beings that you inhabited the world with, then although that seems odd to us, I think some people probably accepted this as part of their life course, that this was a necessary step into the next realm, where because of their skills, perhaps they were seers, they had supernatural skills, they were seen as people who could communicate effectively with the gods.

And if you needed to send an ambassador into that realm, perhaps they were chosen because of those abilities and that this was a kind of honor.

And that brings us to, you know, the fact that many of them do have a violent death.

Many of them show multiple signs of trauma.

Lindo Man is a good example there.

So this isn't something that's carried out one-on-one.

This isn't like heroic combat.

This is a small gang of people taking your life, to my mind, often as quickly as possible with multiple methods.

So, you know, we do have examples of people being clocked over the head, knocked unconscious before the next steps of violence unfold.

And I think, you know, for most people, death in the Iron Age was, you know, probably long, slow and painful.

It was an infection, it was disease, wasting away.

And that is not a good way to die without the aid of the modern medicines that we benefit from.

So although they may have known that death was imminent and sudden and painful for a short period of time, it was a way of taking that step quickly into another world, another realm.

Mel, we'll certainly explore a few other examples which really highlight those varieties of deaths and the various explanations there were across Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Northern Europe for many of these bog bodies that have been put forward, explanations that have been put forward.

But before we get onto that, let's then go back and focus on the importance of bogs for these people, as you've highlighted.

And also, as we also mentioned right at the beginning, you know, someone in their prehistoric lifetime may well have seen the bog move in its size and how much land it was taken up.

Do you think it's pretty clear, also given the whole beliefs of these Iron Age peoples, that they saw bogs as sacred spaces, as liminal zones, as almost places where they can communicate with the gods they believed in?

Yes, when we think of bogs, I mean, the very word has a kind of slightly negative, pejorative kind of overtone to it, because that's how we've been taught to see them.

They're sterile, they're barren, they're dangerous, they need to be drained, you know, they're not productive.

And that's an attitude that has been shaped in our cultural imagination over hundreds of years.

Iron Age people didn't see them like that.

You know, people who lived around wetlands in the Iron Age saw them as places of great wealth, particularly craft material wealth.

So, the woodlands at their edge, their fringe, you know, are rich in small-scale wood that can be rapidly turned into baskets, kind of furniture, building materials, but also charcoal for smelting.

And in the Iron Age, you know, you need huge quantities of charcoal for your iron smelting.

So we know in landscapes like the Fulney Valley, Peter Halkin's work has shown that this is a really productive place where you, you know, cut the woodland to make your charcoal because the thing the bog is also growing is iron ore.

So you have the majority of the iron that people are making their swords and their chariot wheels and their agricultural tools and their craft tools from comes from the kinds of iron ore that precipitate out of these kinds of watery places.

So, you can harvest the ore in chunks or lumps or kind of like reddish-brown crusty layers,

and then you're smelting that down to make your iron ingots.

So, these are places of

metallurgical wealth.

They are also growing the kinds of vegetal fibers that we often now again overlook.

Things like polytricheume commune, the golden ore red hair cat moss, really long strands that can be stripped and woven into garments lightweight hats capes textiles but also again flexible bags and baskets this is the majority of your you know your organic world in the iron age that of course we've lost you know we don't find that well preserved in most places but we do have little glimpses particularly from scotland in some of the roman forts where we've got peatland preservation, so Vinderlander, Newstead, of these kinds of objects that look like they're being made by local craftspeople for the Romans.

They're like, oh my God, it's very rainy here.

I'll have one of those waterproof hats, please.

And so actually, they're really skilled in taking the materials of the bog and using them in craft work for textile production.

There are, you know, particular creatures who inhabit bogs, particularly the Fenlands, but also some of the great Irish bogs, for example.

They are places where seasonal wildfowl will land.

You know, the coming of the geese, the coming of that wildfowl element is a major event in the hunting season.

And it might be feathers as much as kind of bird flesh that people are after to decorate themselves and other objects.

But the peat itself, the peat is formed from sphagnum mosses, which are super absorbent.

That's why our bogs are so wet, but they're also naturally antiseptic.

And time immemorial, they've been used as wound dressings.

We were still getting sphagnum moss to make wound dressings as late as the First First World War when our cotton and lint dressings ran out.

And it is nature's kind of wound medicine.

So I think that the bogs to Iron Age people were places of wealth.

They needed skillful navigation and respect and care.

But again, if we go back to that idea of exchange, they're places you're taking things.

They're places maybe you have to put back things in exchange and thanksgiving.

and particularly at the end of their lives when you know you want to show the gods that you have been grateful for the wealth that you've been given.

And I think it's that going into and out of bogs, that to and fro in daily life that means that they also see things in bogs that, again, we don't see nowadays, but we know from our historic records, these are quite strange places where strange things are met with and encountered.

Is it almost like the great forests in Iron Age Britain, this idea that, you know, they do hold some spiritual importance, but they're not sealed off.

Like like only a select few people can go in because they're important and you know maybe that's one of those these liminal zones and making offerings it is actually the fact that everyone can go there and you know there are so many resources vital for the daily lives of these people that make them so special it's not this idea that they are sealed off and only a select few people can go in and collect the resources it is actually the complete opposite of that Yeah, there's democratic access to a place of wealth if you know how to skillfully work with it.

And of of course, you know, before agricultural improvement and massive landscape drainage, many, many people in Britain and Ireland lived in and around a wetland.

It wasn't far away from you.

It was within a day's journey.

And maybe you went there seasonally for periods of time.

So these are places I think that many people would have been familiar with, but yet they're special.

And so I think if you live in, you know, the heart of the Wessex Chalklands, you know, if we imagine a hill fort like Dainbury, for example, your special special places there may be these little woodland groves, but they also seem to be the subterranean environment that they're digging into to store their grain.

So that is where you focus on putting your gifts, your offerings.

If you live in and around a wetland and you are literally cutting the turf, perhaps, mining the bog ore, I think, again, depth.

and encounters with the uncanny in that environment, this is where you think at least some of the gods gods dwell.

And this is perhaps a portal, a realm where you can enter that other world.

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So familiar, accessible, yet special, these bogs seem to be, and also dangerous at the same time.

So do we still see attempts by the local communities, if they're working in the bogs a lot, if they're making many trips to the bogs, to make it, I guess, safer for them to cross boggy areas, maybe to communicate with another village, or to just go about collecting bog ore and the like?

Yes, and one of the most common things to find in a bog dating to this period is a trackway.

Sometimes they're quite lightweight.

They're little brushwood layers, perhaps with some hurdles laid over the top.

Sometimes they are absolutely monumental, massive.

If we think of Courlae, one of the great corduroy roads that Barry Raftre excavated, these tell us of people going out into the bogs and making a passage route, you know, across the bog or perhaps to connect with little islands in the bog that speak of them at least for a generation or two, making it passable.

Of course, quickly the bog kind of grows over the top and subsumes it but these are these are a testament to the ways in which people are skirting around its edge going out into its depths barry famously called corlay the road to nowhere because you know i think its intent was really to take people out into the heart of a wetland to carry out the kinds of activities that we've just been talking about and that's an amazing trackway the corlay one in ireland today isn't it is it bronze age or iron age i can't remember it's iron age it's an iron age the wonderful thing about that uh that excavation is that because they they've got the preserved timbers, they can do the dendrochronological dating, which really gets us to the felling season and the build season of the wood itself.

And it's a massive communal project that happens in a very short space of time.

And I'm guessing it hints that similar trackways would have been in existence back in the Bronze Age beforehand.

But of course, you have that amazing one surviving from the Iron Age.

It's really fascinating to kind of highlight that wider context of the importance of bogs for these people.

And now, if we return to a few more bog bog bodies examples, I'd like us to go back briefly to that more gruesome aspect of what you mentioned earlier, Mel.

Tolland man seems to be a bloodless death with

the hanging, but you mentioned that there are more bloody deaths, more brutal deaths sometimes with some bog bodies.

So, can we explore some examples of decapitations and bloody deaths that we have from certain bog bodies?

Because it feels important to highlight.

Yeah, and I think certainly in my research, one thing I don't want to gloss over is violence and conflict in the Iron Age.

Small-scale farming communities fall out with each other.

There are incidents that lead to tension and friction, unintentional bloodshed accidents that lead to acts of revenge, rivalries and contests for power, people feeling that others have you know, cast the evil eye on them, that they've cursed them, that their misfortunes are, you know, are either a particular individual's fault,

what we might think more recently as a form of witchcraft, supernatural kind of intervention, or that things are going very, very wrong and they need what's called a scapegoat figure.

And again, we have a classical author's text from France, from the region around Marseille, but around the notion of the creation of a symbolic scapegoat who...

you know who agrees to take on the role of taking away the ills of society lives the life of riley for a year but knows the end is certain so all of these are possibilities you know in terms of like conflict and tension and as well as kind of you know heat of the moment murders and neighbours falling out with each other domestic violence i think we shouldn't underestimate that as well and then just depositing the body in a bog as a place to hide the evidence hide the evidence yes having you know undertaken a yeah an act of you know in the moment killing yes so all of these possibilities so what we need to do with the archaeology is really piece together which of those scenarios fits fits the evidence we have.

So I'm going to focus on two from quite close to home.

Lindo Mann, one of Britain's most famous Bogbody, arguably, where we have an individual who, rather like Tollenmann, Grabalaman, seems to, you know, have a fairly good life.

He's fairly well fed.

He doesn't seem to have had a very onerous agricultural life.

Sometimes we see people absolutely riven with the toil of kind of, you know, and wear and tear of heavy labour.

And he doesn't have those kinds of indications.

But the circumstances around his death are, it's a possibility that he's kind of like brought to his knees, there's a maybe a rib fracture.

Some of those minor bits of evidence, you know, we have to be careful because that could be the weight of the water in the bog or the disturbance of the body itself that leads to those kind of post-depositional or at the moment of excavation injuries.

But he certainly has a massive head trauma wound that effectively fractures his cranium in two places.

I think that's probably something like an axe that is used to do that, a very heavy blunt,

bluntish implement with a sharp edge.

Then we have evidence for a garot, animal sinew tied tightly around the neck and kind of like just tightened to strangle him.

So cutting off oxygen to the brain before we have a throat wound.

Now, I know that the British Museum are undertaking new analysis really as we speak.

So we will wait to see if there's, you know, they they qualify that story it's a real news story to watch but as far as we understand that's at least three different ways of killing the man that all happen in quick succession i find it interesting that the first thing that happens is that they effectively they knock him unconscious and that that injury in itself is fatal but it will take time to unfold but it's that combination of you know, depriving the brain of oxygen and then the act sanguination again, like Rab Alaman, which leads to his death.

So there we have a kind of an almost bit of, you know, ritual performance, I think it's a ritualized performance.

There are a number of people involved, a number of different weapons involved.

It happens quite quickly.

Blood is shed, but the actual manner of the death is kind of quite controlled.

Henry Chapman's landscape work suggests this happens right out on the dome of the bog, right out in the heart of the wet area.

And that actually going out there is quite a dangerous kind of thing.

The journey itself, yeah, to get to the

offering place or execution place is is quite something in itself it's not without risk so i think that tells us that this is a very deliberate death and and to me it has all those hallmarks of a of a ritual performance that suggests that this is a death that has to unfold in a particular way and the the shedding of the blood i think there's something here that suggests this is this is more at the ritual end than punishment and he is placed you know face face down prone on his side, which, you know, as an archaeologist, we're always watching out for that.

It tends to be the indication that something has gone wrong around the time of death and that this is a body that you might fear would become a member of the Walking Dead, might rise again.

So placing the body face down in the bog is a way of ensuring its departure into those bog waters.

So that is a case study where I think that we are dealing with, you know, if I was to choose one where I felt that that notion of sacrifice was most fitting from the Bashars, I think that to me is the best case that is.

Yeah.

And that contrasts, so the other Bog body I work on from that region is called Worsleyman.

And he's cared for by the Manchester Museum.

He's found in Lancashire bog, just to the north of Manchester, part of the Chatmoss complex at Astley.

But here we only have a head.

And we can tell that he was decapitated.

Of course, we can't see the injuries, the trauma on the rest of the body, but it is quite similar to Lindo Mann in that we have severe head trauma and then decapitation.

It was once thought there was another ligature which would have made him almost identical to Lindo Mann, but through the analysis we've done, we can prove that's just a bit of his own neck issue.

But both of these bog bodies actually date to the early Roman period and Worsley Mann is not I think he must be brought to the bog probably in a bag, you know, or a basket.

The head has been decapitated elsewhere.

And with him, you know, he is brought just to the edge of the bog and then placed in.

And I can't help but wonder if this is a rather different story.

You know, in that landscape at that time, you know, the late first through the second century AD,

you know, this is a very difficult place to live as the Romans come and go, boots on the ground, forts being occupied one minute, then they're off north, then they come back again, destabilizing all the local politics.

And we know that they are, you know, throwing their weight around.

They are punishing locals, figuring, you know, out who is powerful and might be a bit of a rival or causing problems and trouble and dispatching these kind of resistance or leader figures or renowned cattle thieves, perhaps.

And I wonder whether this is a decapitation that is meant to be a punishment and a bit of, you know, trophyism on behalf of the Romans, perhaps, or as a result of them, you know, stirring up local politics.

What interests me is that the head is gathered by somebody, is taken to the sacred place and deposited quite perhaps a little bit more furtively, a little bit more secretly, but in the bog.

And so that still speaks to me of ideas, ritual ideas, beliefs perhaps that are lingering well into the Roman period.

But there I think we can tease apart a little bit of a different history.

An external history as well.

It's so interesting when you get cases where you can align it with the romans and what they are doing and i guess i mean a couple of other examples i have here but one which i wanted to mention because it aligns with mention in in roman literature it is another decapitated head the osteobi head isn't it yeah because it has that beautiful knotted hairstyle

which aligns with is it tacitus in his germania or one of them says talks about a particular Germanic people, the Swabi, who had the Swabian knot type of hairstyle.

So I know that doesn't really...

It links up with Worsley Man in regards to the time period that there's interactions with the Romans, but it's just that a fascinating another almost string to your bow of bog body archaeology is when the Romans come and they can align particular cases when actually now need to think you look at the Roman evidence as well to understand more of their story.

Yeah, and of course many of those Roman soldiers are drawn from tribes that have been recently conquered.

You know, they are thought, you know, the troops that ended up in Britain, you know, around Manchester and Cheshire, they are, you know, some of them are from Belgium, some of them are from Germany, some of them from Gaul.

You know, they see an opportunity in the Roman army and they are not alien to a bit of headhunting.

You know, we have depictions on Trajan's column of people brandishing decapitated heads as a trophy, offering it to their Roman masters.

We have...

a tombstone of a cavalry officer from Lancaster and it's quite a famous kind of way of depicting a cavalry officer, triumphant cavalry officer, trampling on the body of a native.

But interestingly, here he is brandishing a decapitated head by its hair.

And I think this is a trope of intimidation against the natives.

It's a language they'll understand, you know.

And so, you know, exactly who's responsible for that little bit of violence.

I think sometimes we have to check ourselves and say, this isn't just always, you know, the local Britons up to a bit of head hunting.

It's the Romans too because they're auxiliary soldiers and that's the world they come from as well so

yeah hairstyles we know the Romans are kind of shocked by the fact that how much we love hair and how much time we we take you know styling it and you know the fact that we love our moustaches and trim our beards and yeah do these fancy hairstyles some of the irish bog bodies again Clony Cavernman has a really elaborate kind of partly shaved hairstyle and then a man bun, which reminds me of contemporary footballers you know and um and hair is a way in which you I mean the Romans are saying oh they're doing it to make them look a bit taller and more impressive well hair is part of your identity and it is part of how you show off your prowess your vitality your renown so it shouldn't surprise us there's a lot of attention to it and that swabian knot you know on the side of the head really is a remarkable piece of hairstyling In the Danish bog bodies, we have extraordinary plaits and lots of plaiting going on.

So yeah,

this is part of how local people kind of really promoted their own identity and their own sense of personhood.

And again, it seems to be a target for those for those Romans.

I'm glad you mentioned Coney Clavenman there as well, because that means we've covered examples from Ireland, Britain, Denmark, the European continent, and so on in this chat, which is really nice.

I would now like to ask about other explanations for bog bodies because I feel we've largely talked about their use in like offerings to the gods, ritual sacrifices, and this idea of very much an organized way of killing for one purpose or another, last meals and so on.

We've also mentioned potential executions and murders as well.

But are there other big explanations that are put forwards for certain bog bodies that we should always also think about when exploring certain cases and take it almost as a case-by-case basis?

Yes, and I think that's where the more historic bodies, bog bodies, really come into their own because for the majority of bog bodies, there's a big survey recently by Roy Van Beek from the Netherlands, and for the majority of the bog bodies, we simply can't say how they died.

And sometimes that's because the human remains themselves aren't well enough preserved to say, but often there is no obvious cause of death.

And I think in order to understand that, we have to remember that certainly by the medieval period, the early modern period, certain kinds of death were thought to be odd

and unexplained.

And early Christian communities had some strange ideas we might see now about who could and couldn't get buried in Christian ground.

So with some of our bodies from the late medieval and historic period, we think we're probably looking at some of the people who were expelled.

from the churchyard, who were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground, the kinds of bodies that elsewhere might be buried at the crossroads.

And these might be people that were suspected of witchcraft.

They might be people who were exiled from the community for other reasons, unmarried mothers, people who died in childbirth, people who died by drowning, people who died by suicide.

You know, these are tough times when people make hard choices or die of infections suddenly, and it's a mystery to that local community and it troubles them.

So I think the bog was a place where later on those kind of marginalised bodies were placed.

And I think probably there was a lingering sense that they were still sacred places, special places, pagan places.

So the body was in the hands of forces that would look after it and care for it, but it couldn't go into the main area of consecrated ground.

So I think that's another alternative.

But these are also very dangerous landscapes that people are forced across.

And they may think that trackway is stable.

They may think that, you know, oh, it's a a quick shortcut.

But we have quite a few texts that tell us about people setting off in bad weather, a couple going to get their marriage certificate registered in Denmark, a couple eloping, it seems, in the Peak District, the Hope couple, very unfortunately named, who flee in a snowstorm, people who might slip off trackways.

These are people who simply didn't make it and by accident fell in the bog.

One of the most famous cases is on Lindomoss, where we have this couple of, you know, chancers, Nat, Bell and Radcliffe, who've been drinking, who think they'll take the shortcut home and they don't make it.

They fall in the bog, they can't pull themselves out, they die of exposure and hypothermia, you know, and if they hadn't been found by their parishioners, they would become two bog bodies.

We also have a number, you know, there's a great study of the paper bog bodies in Scotland, which shows that most of their bog bodies are from this historic period.

And some of these are definitely, you know, cases of murder.

You know, the barrack bog body, which I've been looking at recently, has extraordinary textiles, really well preserved, was found laid out as if it's a formal burial in the bog with the shoes on the chest.

And there, I think we've got an example of a young man, possibly who's been one of the drovers, you know, moving stock long distance, who's fell foul of some kind of incident, whether people were thieving his cattle or he had a bit of a falling out in a in a pub, difficult to say, but he is formally buried in the bog.

And the other source of some of the Scottish bog bodies is we know that non-conformists, the Covenanters, who met on the bog to preach in the open air and worship how they wanted to worship, one of the things that happened is that they were hunted down on the bog and they, you know, they were buried in it if they were executed.

So we do know that this is a place that is used strategically as a place of punishment and of exile, as well as a hiding place for murder victims in the period when we start, you know, most people have pulled away from the bog.

They're not in it routinely anymore.

So it's become this slightly otherworldly, ghostly place where the marginalised dead can be hidden.

And we can use those historic examples to then kind of bring them back into the Iron Age times.

And if you find, let's say, a particular Iron Age bog body that's been dated to the Iron Age, no clear signs of trauma or, you know, bloody killing.

You could actually say, and maybe they say there's a trackway right nearby.

Yeah.

You know, say, well, actually, in this case, I said case-by-case basis, this may well have just been an unlucky individual who fell off the trackway one day and couldn't get out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Accidents happen in prehistory as well.

Well, Mel, this has been fascinating.

I know there is so much more we can explore with the story of bog bodies, but to end this chat, how do you think we should view bog bodies today?

And if we focus on prehistoric bog bodies today, how do you think we should view them?

I've been working with this wonderful group, the different community groups around Lindo Moss, who at the moment are trying to restore their bog, create it as a green lung right in the heart, really of the town itself, protect it from development.

And they've really opened my eyes to the fact that they see their bog body, Lindo Mann, as a real ambassador for that landscape.

He may have died a violent death.

He may have been somebody who was executed or sacrificed in the Iron Age.

But because he is so well known, he is a kind of icon of that wetland landscape.

And he kind of points to us thinking differently about it as a sacred place, a special place.

So actually, having cut it for peat and, you know, for horticulture and gardening for, you know, decades, they want us to think differently about it so that they can restore and wet it.

And this is great for the environment.

You know, bogland restoration, wetland restoration, it's not only going to reduce the kinds of appalling upland blanket bog fires we've seen again this summer, it's going to hold back flooding from the towns at its foot, it's going to restore biodiversity, but it's also going to prevent the release of carbon into the atmosphere.

So it's part of how we combat climate change.

So bog bodies, their stories, but also the things that are found in bogs, those other artefacts, they help us see those landscapes differently.

They help us re-enchant ourselves with them.

We see them as special places.

We care for them more.

And that's why I think those stories need to be told in museums still.

Even if the original story of Lindo Mann is of a violent death,

I'm sure he thought he was going to live on through the memories of the people he left behind as this spiritual champion for the bog.

And that's maybe what he's doing exactly now for us 2,000 years later.

And also very much pushing aside this idea, you know, a a common perception we have of bogs and so on being lifeless, you know, horrible, dark places, but actually they are, you know, I like that idea.

I like how you use the word special there and, you know, important and valuable and historic and prehistoric as well.

Mel, this has been a fascinating chat.

Last but certainly not least, you have written a wonderful book that covers everything we've talked about and so much more.

It is called Bog Bodies Face to Face of the Past.

And you can download it for free through the Manchester University Press website.

And so if there's particular aspects of this you're interested in, you can download an individual chapter or the volume itself.

And I hope you enjoy reading it.

Fantastic.

Must admit, I bought the paperback, got Tolland Man right on the front.

Yeah, it's a stunning image.

Oh, no.

And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

My pleasure, Tristan.

Well, there you go.

That was Professor Melanie Giles talking you through the story of bog bodies.

I hope you enjoyed the episode.

I found it fascinating how there are so many different potential explanations for many of these bog bodies and you know how some of them are linked to cold-blooded murder, others to rituals and sacrifice and others potentially just to accidents, to people falling in these bogs thousands of years ago and their bodies never being recovered.

Thank you for listening.

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