The sleepers in the moor

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Die Schläfer im Moor is the title of the German translation of the Danish textbook Mosefolket: Jernalderens Mennersker bevaret i 2000 AR by the Danish archaeologist Peter Vilhelm Glob , about the archaeological investigations of northern European moorland finds . The Danish original was published by Gyldendal in 1965 . Shortly after it was first published in Denmark, the book was translated into German by Thyra Dorenburg in 1966 and published by Winkler-Verlag. In the same year a French translation by Eric Eydoux followed, and in 1969 it was published by the archaeologist Rupert Bruce-Mitford in English translation by Faber and Faber London.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is dedicated to the Tollund man and the second to the Grauballe man , both of whom were discovered only a few years earlier on Jutland and are among the best-known bog bodies of the Iron Age . The third and fourth chapters deal with the context of the bog body finds from Denmark and the rest of Europe. The last two chapters examine the living conditions and burial rites of the Iron Age people in Denmark.

Glob's book has been very well received internationally and has received numerous positive reviews, including from Barry Cunliffe in the journal Nature and Ralph M. Rowlett in the journal American Anthropologist . Among other things, they praised Glob's writing style, the arguments he put forward and his use of images and photos. In the following decades, however, the technical criticism of Glob's conclusions became more nuanced.

Summary

Chapter one deals with the man from Tollund , who was discovered in 1950 in a raised bog in Bjaeldskovdal, ten kilometers west of Silkeborg in Denmark. Glob describes the excavation of the corpse and his personal contribution to the processing, salvage and transfer of the find to the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. It gives a detailed overview of the scientific processing and conservation of the find, in particular how the head of the Tollund man was prepared for the exhibition in the Silkeborg Museum. In addition, it also deals with the archaeological context, the scientific research results on the circumstances of life, death and clothing and, last but not least, the last meal of the Tollund man.

In the second chapter, entitled The Man from Grauballe , Glob deals with the bog corpse of the same name, which was found in 1952 in Nebelgårdsmose, about 18 km east of Tollund. As in the previous chapter, he discusses his personal view of the discovery, the scientific investigation and conservation of the find as well as the circumstances surrounding a death and burial.

In the third chapter, The Moor People in Denmark , Glob states that more than 150 moor bodies are known from Denmark alone. He presents a series of examples such as the wife of Haraldskær and the bog bodies of Borremose and works out their similarities. In view of the fact that many bog bodies were discovered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he notes that, due to the inadequate conservation and scientific investigation possibilities, not much was known about these finds.

Chapter four The bog people in other countries presents similar bog body finds from Germany and the Netherlands, such as the child from Windeby , and refers to a project to catalog all known bog body finds by the German archaeologist Alfred Dieck .

How They Lived is the title of the fifth chapter. In a larger context, it depicts the life of the Iron Age people on the Danish peninsula, such as social order, settlement and house building as well as clothing.

The last chapter, When Death Came, gives an overview of the places of death in the Danish Iron Age, it introduces the common form of burial of cremation and points out deviations such as the sinking of the dead in swamps and moors. Glob argues that the latter is evidence of the widespread tradition of human sacrifice to the fertility goddess Nerthus described by Tacitus in his work Germania . an interpretation that is often no longer so vehemently advocated today.

Scientific reception

The English archaeologist Barry Cunliffe of the University of Southampton published an extensive review in the journal Nature in 1969 . In it, he describes the only disappointment in Glob's book as the lack of information about daily life and social structures in Iron Age Denmark. But he sees this deficiency more than compensated for by the other chapters. Glob presented a picture of the ritual practices of the Iron Age people in a detective manner. Cunliffe praises the use of photographs, which he describes as brilliant. Cunliffe also praises Bruce-Mitford's English translation, the overall effect of which he describes as stimulating and challenging. In summary, he rates the English translation as a “great book, full of details and fascination”, which appeals to experts and a readership interested in archeology in equal measure.

Ralph M. Rowlett of the University of Missouri published a 1970 review in American Anthropologist magazine. He notes that there is much of Glob's book of interest to anthropologists, and he hopes they won't be deterred by Glob's “gossip and anecdotes” targeting his Danish audience and his “very personal and culturally ultra-Danish tone” . He praises Glob's use of ethnological comparisons and Roman literature to illuminate living conditions in the Iron Age, and describes the book as one of the best modern ethnographic descriptions of the Northern Germanic people of his time. Furthermore, he sees Glob's theories as confirmation of the authenticity of Tacitus' descriptions. Rowlett praises Bruce-Mitford's translation, but notes a "slight tendency towards over-translation" in the place names and is opposed to the conversion of metric measurements into the Anglo-American system of measurement . In conclusion, Rowlett states that Glob's work together with Alfred Dieck's cataloging of the bog corpses, which is currently in progress, marked the beginning of a by no means exhausted field of science.

General reception

In a scholarly article from 1995, CS Briggs of the Royal Commission on Ancient Historical Monuments of Wales criticized Globs hastily drawn conclusions, which in his opinion he did not substantiate conclusively with archaeological evidence. Briggs asks: “Whether Glob's book still meets the minimum standards of good scientific practice today”. In particular, Briggs notes that Glob classified numerous bog bodies as Iron Age before they were reliably dated by a 14 C dating . He also criticized Globs too confident interpretation of from the Middle Ages derived wife Drumkeeragh as Danish Viking without covering them supporting evidence.

In his 1996 book Mumien aus dem Moor - The prehistoric and early moor corpses from north-western Europe , Wijnand van der Sanden describes Glob's work as "well written and understandable". “After all, no other book has made the bog bodies as well known as this work written for the general public.” He notes with admiration that he “would have liked to write it himself - in his day”. In their volume of essays published in 2007 on the scientific revision of the Grauballe man, Pauline Asingh and Niels Lynnerup explain that Glob's book made a significant contribution to the study of bog bodies and aroused the interest of many people in the prehistory.

In her 2009 study on the cultural and artistic reception of bog bodies, Karin Sanders noticed that her interest in archeology was aroused while reading Glob's book in the library of her elementary school near Copenhagen. She describes the book as a classic , which is still one of the basic works on artistic forms of expression of the bog corpses even in the 21st century . In her research into the influence of Glob's work, she found that many artists and scholars used it as a basis for their examination of the subject of bog bodies. Glob knew how to mix a sober archaeological factual template with a narrative and to fully exploit the potential of an interaction of facts and fiction. The magic of Glob's text lies not only in its sensational subject matter, but also in its narrative style, a mixture of scientific-archaeological discourse and mythological-poetic narration, and not least in the use of the photographs.

meaning

Peter Vilhelm Globs Mosevolket can be counted as the first popular scientific work on bog corpse research . It was the basis for a general observation of bog corpses in science and the public. With this book Glob gave new impetus to European peatland research.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Glob: The sleepers in the moor. Pp. 7-24
  2. ↑ Glob: The sleepers in the moor. Pp. 25-49
  3. ↑ Glob: The sleepers in the moor. Pp. 50-82
  4. ↑ Glob: The sleepers in the moor. Pp. 50-98
  5. ↑ Glob: The sleepers in the moor. Pp. 99-121
  6. ↑ Glob: The sleepers in the moor. Pp. 122-168
  7. ↑ Allan A. Lund: Critical Research Report on Germania des Tacitus ( Parts I - IV, Part V: Bibliographical overview of Germania editions and comments from the years 1880 to 1989 below pp. 2341 - 2344 ), in: Haase, Hans ( Ed.): The rise and fall of the Roman world (ANRW). History and Culture of Rome as Reflected in Recent Research , Part II: Principat , Vol. 33, 3: Language and Literature (General information on the literature of the second century and individual authors of the Trajan and early Hadrian times ), Berlin, New York 1991, p. 1989 -2222
  8. ^ Barry Cunliffe: Review of The Bog People . In: Nature . No. 223 , 1969, p. 423-424 (English, online [PDF]).
  9. ^ Ralph M. Rowlett: Review of The Bog People . In: American Anthropologist . No. 72.6 , 1970, ISSN  1548-1433 , pp. 1568-1569 (English).
  10. ↑ Can Glob's book today actually pass muster as responsible popular scholarship?
  11. ↑ CS Briggs: Did They Fall or Were They Pushed? Some Unresolved Questions about Bog Bodies . In: Richard C. Turner; Robert G. Scaife (Ed.): Bog Bodies - New Discoveries and New Perspectives . British Museum Press, London 1995, ISBN 0-7141-2305-6 , pp. 168-182 (English).
  12. ^ Wijnand van der Sanden : Mummies from the moor. The prehistoric and protohistoric bog bodies from northwestern Europe . Batavian Lion International, Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-6707-416-0 , pp. 7–8 (Dutch, original title: Vereeuwigd in het veen . Translated by Henning Stilke).
  13. ↑ Grauballe Man. An Iron Age Bog Body Revisited . In: Pauline Asingh, Niels Lynnerup (Eds.): Jutland Archaeological Society publications . tape 49 . Jutland Archaeological Society, Moesgaard 2007, ISBN 978-87-88415-29-2 , pp. 9-10 (English).
  14. ^ Karin Sanders: Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2009, ISBN 978-0-226-73404-0 , pp. XIII-XIV (English).
  15. ^ Karin Sanders: Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2009, ISBN 978-0-226-73404-0 , pp. 17-19 (English).