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Academic research has questioned the ethics of displaying such visceral and disquieting remains, especially when they have died very violently. Yet the general public are often firmly attached to their local ‘bog body’, giving them personal names and petitioning vigorously for their repatriation to local museums (as in the case of Lindow Man). This chapter will present a critical review of how different museums display their bog bodies and illustrate ‘best practice’ examples and novel museological interpretive strategies: defending the importance of keeping bog bodies on display to open up conservations about death, loss and mortality.
Having explored what people might have taken from the bog, this chapter examines what they left, in terms of non-human deposits from the bog. It reviews some of the most spectacular bog offerings – wagons, chariotry and horse gear, weapons and cauldrons – as well as the mundane – agricultural tools, foodstuffs, cloth and jewellery, even hair. The chapter will focus on the phenomena of bog butter and consider if this reveals a knowledge of the preservative properties of the bog. Having conjured the range of depositions made, it will then consider how we interpret these acts: were they gifts or exchanges with supernatural beings, gods or deities? Or do we need to de-sacralise our interpretations and accept that it was in the act of giving up that things achieved their true value in a shifting and threatening world. Finally, it will end with the phenomenon of the bog figures, to reflect on these ideas and make the bridge with the real bodies found in their depths.
Setting the scene for the monograph, this short chapter outlines the importance of the study, its original approach and its timely significance: synthesising and critically evaluating the latest finds from north-western Europe as well as presenting for the first time the original forensic analysis of Manchester’s bog head ‘Worsley Man’, which forms the epicentre of the book. Taking a ‘biographical’ approach to these iconic human remains, the monograph is the first to study the whole life cycle of a bog body: from discovery to conservation, analysis and interpretation, to their exhibition and display, as well as creative ‘afterlife’ in wider cultural imagination. It argues that bog bodies are not a coherent phenomenon representing human sacrifice in later prehistory but instead represent a range of different identities, histories and ends, even if many of these are violent. Ultimately the book defends the special significance of the bog both in terms of its preservative properties and its role as a place rich in resources but animate and dangerous, in the minds of Iron Age and early Roman communities in north-western Europe.
One of the key challenges facing archaeologists is how to conserve the remarkable features and evidence of these bog bodies. This chapter briefly reviews changing methods of preservation, from nineteenth-century drying and tanning, to the latest freeze-drying and PEG methods of conserving remains. It draws on first-hand museum interviews with curators and ‘lessons learned’ from past exhibits to evaluate the best methods of preserving the dead. It then considers the philosophical dilemmas posed by conserving bog bodies: interrupting the processes begun by the bog only to try and mimic their preservative powers. The chapter closes with a consideration of aspects of authenticity and aura in relation to the well-preserved dead, arguing that conservation should be recast not as a sleight of hand, but as a form of ongoing ‘care’ for the dead.
This chapter will review the lives and deaths of individuals who end up in the bogs: evaluating the competing arguments for their fate, from accidental death to suicide, burial, murder, execution and sacrifice. It will explore the lives they lived, from unique insights into diet, disease and personal appearance, to mobility, origin and status, which can be gleaned from their remains. Who were they? What life had they lived up until this point? This chapter will discuss new evidence that some bogs were used in later prehistory as part of the mortuary process, using the preservative powers of its waters and temporary immersion to slow time before final burial. The chapter seeks to temper the classical authors’ accounts of barbarism or sacrifice within a wider appreciation of the motives and mindsets of later prehistoric communities, often facing considerable periods of environmental change or political unrest. It will normalise the apparent brutality we see in the bog bodies alongside other wetland and dryland remains, arguing that they represent one end of a spectrum of violence deployed as a strategy of control: using the ethnography of violence to understand – if not to excuse – the violence we witness in these remains.
This chapter presents an original re-analysis of ‘Worsley Man’: Manchester Museum’s bog head, incorporating a new radiocarbon date, forensic analysis of trauma and identification of cause of death, isotopic analysis of hair, histological analysis of both human tissue and supposed animal tissue ‘ligature’, HMXIF scan and conservation history. It will include a specific consideration of the power of the ‘head’ in cultural history and the specific connotations it might have had for the ancient Britons as well as their Roman conquerors (including a section here on the Insus cavalryman figure). It will also highlight the Lancashire phenomenon of the ‘screaming skull’ that, once found, must be cared for and kept close to the living, as a way of understanding the feelings of ownership and belonging often attached to the ancient dead.
Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are well-known because of their rich grave goods, but this wealth can obscure their importance as local phenomena and the product of pluralistic multi-generational communities. This book explores over one hundred early Anglo-Saxon and some Merovingian cemeteries and aims to understand them using a multi-dimensional methodology. The performance of mortuary drama was a physical communication and so needed syntax and semantics. This local knowledge was used to negotiate the arrangement of cemetery spaces and to construct the stories that were told within them. For some families the emphasis of a mortuary ritual was on reinforcing and reproducing family narratives, but this was only one technique used to arrange cemetery space. This book offers an alternative way to explore the horizontal organisation of cemeteries from a holistic perspective. Each chapter builds on the last, using visual aesthetics, leitmotifs, spatial statistics, grave orientation, density of burial, mortuary ritual, grave goods, grave robbing, barrows, integral structures, skeletal trauma, stature, gender and age to build a detailed picture of complex mortuary spaces. This approach places community at the forefront of interpretation because people used and reused cemetery spaces and these people chose to emphasise different characteristics of the deceased because of their own attitudes, lifeways and lived experiences. This book will appeal to scholars of Anglo-Saxon studies and will also be of value to archaeologists interested in mortuary spaces, communities and social differentiation because it proposes a way to move beyond grave goods in the discussion of complex social identities.
To conclude, Chapter 6, ‘Kinship and community’, places the cemeteries back into their cultural context by discussing the legal and textual evidence. Like Chapter 1, this chapter explores whole cemeteries. Each preceding chapter built on the last to introduce thematic elements; this chapter explores cemeteries as complete, and as social phenomena. It establishes cemetery space as a unique and local creation. Each cemetery used different methods which could differentiate between groups of graves and identify distinguished individuals from different generations. However, the creation of these burials was not solely to reconstruct the personhood of the deceased; it also recreated community narrative with a ‘scopic regime’. This localised way of seeing used gender and life course as well as situational, political and regional identities within a conglomerate, multi-layered mesh of characteristics. It is this dispositional difference between graves, and between sites and across regions that can be used to discuss the nature of Anglo-Saxon society.
Chapter 4, ‘The grammar of graves’, explores leitmotifs, cultural themes in funerary display. These include social hierarchy, core burials, sex, gender and age. Plots or groups of graves were often structured using the location of significant burials within them. This focus may have been on the core groups of graves, which sometimes encircled specific individuals. Interestingly, graves with mounds on them were targeted by contemporary grave robbers, but some types of grave were deliberately avoided. Elaborate burials with exposed markers were a tool used by a community to create key ancestors who formed powerful parts of the communal identity.