Archaeology Ireland, vol. 20, no. 1, issue 75, (Spring), 26-30. , 2006

Archaeology Ireland, Heritage Guide, No. 35., 2006

Ireland, presents extraordinary new evidence linking the location ofbog bodies and other itual depositions to ancient tribal boundaries which are recognisable in today's barony boundaries.

The comparative study of the selected bog bodies and their cultural landscape reveals that the European cultural heritage show similarities and differences in insular and continental north-west Iron Age Europe. The way in which bog bodies were killed and deposited (wetland) could indicate the existence of a common religious belief system linked to sacrifice and fertility rites, a practice that follows ancient traditions and was later integrated in the Nordic Iron Age/Viking Age rite of the hanging cult of Odin, god of the hanged. The paper discusses the similarities in practice and presents a new perspective on Iron Age belief systems in north-west Europe associated with the bog body phenomenon and the wider context. MA-Thesis Celtic Archaeology, Bangor University April, 2021

Lindow Man, the British Bog Body discovered in 1984, and the Danish examples Tollund and Grauballe Men, discovered in 1950 and 1952, represent quite literally the violent face of a confrontational past. But what exactly do the archaeological narratives say? When presented with the forensic evidence can we explicitly conclude they were murdered as human sacrifices to appease the Germanic and Celtic gods and goddesses during times of affliction? Or are they simply an example of our own imposition of modern assumptions onto the past in a flare of sensationalism and mystical dramatization of the tumultuous affairs of noble savages? How have these narratives played out in the public sphere, particularly museum and heritage, and in modern culture such as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s bog poems. Do they reinforce harmful myths of an excessively violent past dominated by innately uncivilized natives? Who does the past really belong to and who has the authority to voice it? Many facets of b...

Textual Practice, 2002

2008

This essay is about bog bodies – the preserved remains of prehistoric humans, often interpreted as ritual killings, found in peat bogs across northwest Europe. It considers the production of knowledge about the human past as a complex, relational process implicating multiple actors and traversing the terms of any straightforward nature-culture binary. It argues that theorizations of collective memory – and in particular of its ‘collective’ aspect need to pay closer attention, both to the role of non-human agencies in the shaping of humanly intelligible artefacts and histories and to the relationship between preservation and transformation as a constitutive feature of collective memory. By way of illustration, it traces in some detail the story of one particular bog body, from death and deposition in the ground through rediscovery, excavation, archaeological analysis and subsequent public display. DOI: 10.3176/tr.2008.3.05

Bog bodies, ritual violence, and non-places. In: Harald Meller, Roberto Risch, Kurt W. Alt, François Bertemes u. Rafael Micó (Hrsg.), Rituelle Gewalt – Rituale der Gewalt/Ritual Violence – Rituals of Violence. Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle 22 (Halle/Saale 2020) 379–394.

Bog bodies have always attracted public interest; the lifelike preservation of the dead, but also the traces of excessive violence on the corpses or their, from today's point of view, strange treatment, make the bog bodies a special and, in a broader context, irregular group of finds. Due to numerous unobjective contributions, bog body research has been discredited, so that it has been marginalised in the scientific discourse. On the basis of recent investigations, earlier interpretations can be corrected and new insights can be gained. However, a generally accepted interpretation of the bog bodies has not yet been achieved. A critical analysis of bog body depositions shows parallels to contemporary sacrificial practices, but also to a fear of death that is evident in regular burials. The bog corpses reveal an extraordinary ritualised violence, which finds its closest parallels in the contemporary Scandinavian war booty sacrifices. Human sacrifice is the exception rather than the rule in Iron Age societies in north-western Europe. It is an extreme form of sacrifice that also required special ritual precautions against both the rejection of the sacrifice and the reappearance of the dead.