Table Of ContentAbout the Authors
Miranda Aldhouse-Green is Professor Emeritus at Cardiff University. She
specializes in the study of shamanism and archaeology of the Iron Age. She has
published widely on the Celts and their world, including: The Celtic Myths,
Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend and Exploring the World of the Druids.
Val McDermid is a bestselling novelist, recipient of the Gold Dagger award for
Best Crime Novel of the Year and cofounder of the world’s largest crime fiction
festival. Her novels have been translated into over thirty languages, selling more
than eleven million copies worldwide. She recently released Forensics: The
Anatomy of Crime (2014), an exploration of the science behind crime scene
investigation.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends
Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend
The World of the Celts
The World of the Druids
See our websites
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Val McDermid
INTRODUCTION
Unveiling the Dead: Introducing the Bog Bodies of Ancient Europe
CHAPTER 1
Discoveries & Discoverers
CHAPTER 2
The World of the Bog People: Space, Time and Society
CHAPTER 3
The Magic of Bog Preservation
CHAPTER 4
Crime Scene Investigation: The Application of Forensic Science
CHAPTER 5
Accident, Execution or Murder?
CHAPTER 6
Modus Operandi: Ways of Killing
CHAPTER 7
Instrumental Violence: Abuse with Purpose
CHAPTER 8
The Chosen Ones
CHAPTER 9
Natural Born Killers
CHAPTER 10
Bog Deaths & Human Sacrifice
EPILOGUE
Listening to the Dead: Bog Bodies Uncovered
APPENDIX
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
COPYRIGHT
FOREWORD
Val McDermid
We all carry our history under our skin. Where we’ve been, what we’ve done,
how we lived. But for thousands of years that history, which our ancestors took
to the grave, remained secret. Now, thanks to the giant leaps science has made in
recent years, we can read those messages from the past. And finally, we can
begin to peel back the layers and reveal the answers to mysteries that have
confounded us for generations.
Among the most puzzling of those mysteries was that of the ancient bog
bodies of Northern Europe. Buried in peat marshes and bogs, the unique
environment meant their remains were preserved to a remarkable extent. That
was exciting enough in itself for archaeologists and anthropologists. But what
gradually became clear was that many of the bodies discovered – generally by
chance, by farmers and peat cutters – had met violent deaths at the hands of
others.
What crime writer wouldn’t be fascinated by this phenomenon?
My own interest in the subject was piqued by an idea I had for a book that
had its roots in the relatively recent past, a mere couple of hundred years ago.
The Grave Tattoo was inspired by one fact and one rumour. The fact: the poet
William Wordsworth and the Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian went to school
together in the Lake District. The rumour: Fletcher Christian didn’t die on
Pitcairn Island in the South Seas – he returned to England, where he was
sheltered from the forces of law and order by his friends and family. I began to
build a present-day thriller round these historic events, but I needed something
dramatic to kick-start the story.
I remembered seeing the recovered bog body known as Lindow Man on
display in Manchester Museum in the late 1980s. I’d been astonished at the
degree of preservation it displayed, and the amount of information scientists had
been able to garner from it. I wondered if a body that had only been in a bog for
two hundred years could reveal even more.
I soon discovered how forensic techniques had evolved – and are still
evolving – to provide data on everything from the diet these people consumed to
the places where they lived and travelled while they were alive. Analysis of teeth
and bones gives us an astonishingly detailed timeline of their movements.
Thanks to mass spectrometry, now we can even tell where their mothers were
living when they were pregnant. Facial reconstruction experts reveal what these
people looked like in life. And we can uncover the violence with which they met
their deaths. All perfect grist to the mill for my fiction. Because I get to make up
the bits between the science, the pieces of the puzzle we can’t quite grasp.
What we can’t know are the underlying reasons behind the facts. But by
learning all we can, it’s possible to come up with coherent theories that make
sense of what we see. And that’s where Miranda Aldhouse-Green has come to
our aid. In this fascinating exploration of the phenomenon of bog bodies, she
whets our appetite with the big picture of where, when and how these bodies
began to turn up.
Then she examines the detail of a selection of the bodies, revealing how they
gave up their secrets to us over the years and exposing the violence and apparent
ritual that mark so many of their deaths.
Finally she delves under the shroud of mystery that surrounds them,
exploring theories and suggesting histories for their lives that make sense of their
deaths.
Human beings are curious by nature. We like answers. That’s one of the
reasons I believe crime fiction is so popular. We can never know for certain how
these bodies ended up with this very particular form of burial. The reasons are
lost in a past that left no written records. All we can do is interrogate what is left.
And that is what this book does so satisfyingly.
Description:The grisly story of the bog bodies, updated via details of archaeological discovery and crime-scene techniquesSome 2,000 years ago, certain unfortunate individuals were violently killed and buried not in graves but in bogs. What was a tragedy for the victims has proved an archaeologist's dream, for
