A Brief History of Bog Bodies

In America, bogs have a pleasant association with New England’s cranberry harvest and traditional Thanksgiving dishes. In Northern Europe, bogs offer more sinister produce, from wads of ancient butter to leathery chunks of human bodies—which give archaeologists a view of life and death as it was centuries ago.

1. For the Love of Peat
2. Violent Ends
3. Digging for DNA

For the Love of Peat

Most bog objects have been discovered during the process of harvesting peat, an organic soil composed of vegetation like sphagnum moss that has decayed over time. When dried, it can be burned and used as a fuel. But peat in a cold wetland environment also creates anoxic (oxygen-free) conditions that slow the decomposition of organic remains in the bog. The combination of cool climate and anoxic water in these northern bogs makes conditions just right for long-term preservation.

Numerous examples of “bog butter” have emerged in Scotland and Ireland. These stinky, yellowish globs can weigh up to 50 kilograms (110 pounds) and are generally found in wooden containers or animal skins for protection. Dating to 3000 BCE, some of the butter is made out of dairy fat, and some of it is made from lard or tallow, according to isotope testing. Butter was ubiquitous in many past eras, acting not only as a food but as a salve for wounds and a substitute for cash in paying taxes, so it’s also possible it was buried to protect a family’s wealth from thieves.

As weird as it must be to find a barrel of rancid butter the size of a small child in a bog, imagine finding ropy hunks of a human body instead.

The bog-preserved people are technically natural mummies, but their bodies aren’t like the desiccated mummies from Egypt or freeze-dried mummies from the high Andes. Many peat bogs have highly acidic water, which actually dissolves skeletons by leaching out the calcium phosphate in the bones. But the skin and organs are preserved thanks to the lack of oxygen. Tannins, a chemical compound in the peat, turn the skin brown and leather-like, and the result is a human-shaped skin bag that retains astonishing detail—fingerprints, whiskers, wrinkles.

Some of these mummies date back to 8000 BCE, and others have been transformed as recently as World War I, in the case of Russian and German soldiers who died fighting in a lake district in Poland. Today, researchers count only about four dozen bog bodies that are intact and have appropriate archaeological context, with the majority from Europe’s Iron Age, a period from around 900 BCE to Roman contact in the 1st century CE. This time period coincided with an increase in weaponry and violence throughout the region.  Interestingly enough, bogs can also contain iron, and many objects from this period were smelted from bog iron.

Violent Ends

Many bog bodies share similarities in the manner of death and circumstances of burial. Take three of the most famous specimens: Tollund Man (4th century BCE), Grauballe Man (3rd century BCE), and Lindow Man (1st century CE). All were found mostly or completely naked with evidence of having met violent ends.

The best studied of all the bog bodies, Tollund Man (named for the town in Denmark near where he was discovered) was initially thought to have been a modern murder victim when he was found in 1950. His lack of clothing (save for a felt hat and a belt) was odd—but not as strange as the remains of a noose around his neck. Forensic scientists who examined the body in 2002 found that Tollund Man’s tongue was distended—an indication he had been hanged. The stubble on his face suggests Tollund Man didn’t shave for at least a day prior, and analysis of his gut contents revealed a meal of barley and flax porridge eaten 12 to 24 hours before death.

A couple years later, a peat cutter discovered Grauballe Man in a bog about 18 kilometers (11 miles) from Tollund. Unlike Tollund Man, Grauballe Man was completely naked. His shock of red hair looks almost like a wig, the result of discoloration from the bog. No noose was found with this body; rather, his neck had been slit open so violently that his trachea and esophagus were severed. Grauballe Man’s remains actually include bones. He was likely an older adult, based on the degeneration of his spine, and his teeth suggested his childhood involved periods of poor health.

Lindow Man, discovered in 1984 in a peat bog near Manchester, is the most complete bog body found in the UK. He wore a fox-fur armband, but otherwise was completely naked. And his death was perhaps the most violent of all known bog bodies. First, he was clocked on the head with a blunt object; he may have fallen unconscious but didn’t die from the injury; there is evidence of slight healing in the wound. He was stabbed in the chest but also strangled with a sinew cord that was recovered with his body. Other wounds include a broken rib and broken neck vertebrae, but with archaeo-forensic cases, it is not always possible to tell which injuries happened when. For his last meal, Lindow Man appears to have had toast.

Other examples of murdered men thrown into ancient bogs include Dätgen Man from Germany, who had been beaten, stabbed, and decapitated; the Nieuw-Weerdingen Men from the Netherlands, one of whom had been disemboweled; and Old Croghan Man from Ireland, whose nipples had been cut out, possibly as a way of torturing him before death.

They weren’t all men, either. One of the Borremose Women from Denmark was discovered with a belt around her neck and an infant in her arms. “Moora” from Germany is mostly skeletonized, but she was malnourished and had suffered two skull fractures before her death. And Kayhausen Boy from Germany was around 7 to 10 years old when he was stabbed repeatedly in the throat and arm. Especially poignant was his infected hip socket, which would have disabled him and caused him pain at the end of his short life.

The real question that’s been haunting archaeologists since the bog bodies started to be uncovered in the 19th century is, why were all these people murdered? There aren’t yet any definitive answers, in particular because bog bodies span nearly 10 millennia and much of a continent. Any explanation for violence and burial in the past has to be based in large part on culture, and culture changes dramatically over time and place.

For the most part, archaeologists have advanced two general theories for the murders of the bog bodies. The much earlier Bronze Age bodies are thought to have been human sacrifices, particularly because many of the people were adolescents and young adults when they were killed.

The second theory concerns the Iron Age bodies, which may have been those of criminals or other people considered socially deviant. Artifact evidence suggests that bogs may have held ritual significance since they are an interesting geographical feature: neither solid land nor open water. During a tumultuous time just prior to prolonged contact with the Romans, where northern European groups began to see the start of hierarchy and social class differentiation, perhaps ignominious burial in a bog was Iron Age people’s way of separating “us” from “them.”

Digging for DNA

Since 2000, about half-a-dozen bog bodies have been discovered in Ireland, and new studies of bog bodies found decades ago are giving us new insight into life in northern Europe in the 1st millennium BCE.

Contemporary techniques to analyze the bodies include 3D CT scanning, which doesn’t destroy the skin the way that traditional autopsy would. The diet of the bog people is being reconstructed through carefully extracted gut contents and chemical analysis, revealing varied diets with a lot of grain and local seeds. The bodies are also revealing their parasites. Every single bog body that has been directly examined with modern techniques has had a parasitic infection, usually roundworm or whipworm.

One thing that archaeologists are still lacking, however, is high-quality DNA from the remains. Though Grauballe Man was tested for ancient DNA, his body did not produce any, probably because the acidic conditions in the bog damaged the proteins on which ancient DNA testing is typically done. As this technology progresses, bog bodies’ DNA may soon give us deeper insights into their lives.

But all of this information is still coming from individual remains. Unlike with bioarchaeological research, which uses hundreds of skeletons from one cemetery to understand whole populations of past people, bog bodies are still found in isolated contexts, purely by chance. The recent finds in Ireland, however, suggest that more bog bodies will come to the surface. When they do, archaeologists and forensic specialists armed with the latest techniques will be on hand to coax new clues from the depths of the bog.

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A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2024.