People from the Peat
The conversation was hot and heavy at the next table in the coffee shop, and I nearly got into it. The subject was human remains; most of the speakers were not happy with what they saw as irreverent treatment of Native American bones and funerary artifacts held by museums.
"It's so disrespectful," one young woman said. "How would they like it if their ancestors were on display like that, dug up and stuck in glass boxes with people walking by and pointing?" Cultures differ: I almost blurted out that I'd done just that, observed an ancestor in a glass box. and I was glad he was there.
Actually, I have no proof that he's my ancestor. He lived in what is now Denmark, and the known family tree has no Danes. But he lived two thousand years ago, and given the movements of people throughout Northern Europe over the past twenty centuries, surely some of his genes now lie on my chromosomes.
And he now lies on view in a museum---not just his bones, mind, but a quite recognizable person. He is among the best preserved of the so-called bog people, ancient men and women whose bodies and even clothing have been saved through time by the airless and acid conditions in peat bogs. In his case, the natural tanning process begun by the bog was completed by science. He seems to be a man made of leather, though not a perfect one. You wouldn't assume he was about to get up and walk away. Part of him is a bit collapsed---bog acid is harder on bone than on skin. And beneath his chin lies a long, broad gash: his throat was cut.
Like him, most of the bog people died violently, and not by accident. Careful study of their burial sites, the means by which they were killed, their stomach contents, and even the written accounts of Roman historians have yielded a fairly well-accepted picture of their fate.
The bogs where bodies have been found are ones long in use; in fact, bodies usually turn up during the course of peat harvesting (discoveries often followed by urgent calls to the police, because the finders recognize that murder has been done, but are misled by the body's state of preservation into thinking it is a recent crime). The victims seem to have been killed at or near the spot where they lie, and they lie in old excavations---that is, places where people of their own time or even earlier had already cut away the peat. In effect, their resting places were already prepared for them.
Nearly all the bodies, however they had died, bore knotted ropes around their necks. Many were fastened down in their boggy graves, with bent boughs, stakes, or stones. All stomach contents that could be analyzed showed that last meals were vegetarian---almost exclusively seeds and grains.
Taken together, the evidence indicated that the bog people were not victims of random clime but of ritual sacrifice. They were people chosen to die that the earth would be reborn. To keep their spirits in the sacred, fuel-providing bogs, they were fastened symbolically to the ground. The meals were both the last of winter's store and, as seeds, the kernels of spring's seasonal rejuvenation. The ropes about their necks may have been practical death-dealing devices, but they were also necklaces, the mark of the earth goddess. These deductions were supported by the Roman historians who recorded accounts of the northern Germans, especially the tribe that lived in what is now Danish Jutland.
Which is where the bog man I saw lived, died, and still lies. His presence demands respect, and brings home the terrible reality in the textbook term "human sacrifice." Behind the glass, that display is painfully, inarguably human.
