Wife of Borremose

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Borremose's wife

The wife of Borremose (also bog body Borremose III ) is a Late Bronze Age bog body , which in the 1948 eponymous peat bog in Aars in the municipality of Vesthimmerland ( Denmark was found).

Finding circumstances

The woman was the third of the bog bodies from Borremose, which were discovered by peat cutters in Borremose from 1946 to 1948 . It was only 400 meters from the place where Borremose's man was found in 1946 . The director of the Vesthimmerlandmuseum had the corpse packed in a wooden box together with the surrounding damp layer of moor and sent it - like the two earlier ones - to the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen . In his accompanying letter of July 23, 1948 he wrote: "Today I have the pleasure of sending the traditional annual bog body from Borremose." In the museum, after tissue samples were taken, the body was wrapped in phenol- soaked cloths for four months and then, as zoological specimen, in a trough in a 2% formalin preserved . For further storage, the corpse was wrapped in cloths and recently wrapped in plastic in a zinc-studded box, where it is unpacked twice a year and sprayed with formalin solution.

Location: 56 ° 47 ′ 40.1 ″  N , 9 ° 34 ′ 32.1 ″  E Coordinates: 56 ° 47 ′ 40.1 ″  N , 9 ° 34 ′ 32.1 ″  E

description

Borremose's wife (rear view)

The stout, adult woman was lying on her stomach, face down. She was wrapped in a woolen blanket that reached to the armpits on the front, but to the base of the head in the back. The right part of your buttocks was uncovered. Her left arm lay under the drawn up left leg, the right one bent towards her face. The blanket had a size of 175 cm × 115 cm. It had a number of holes in it and was held together with a leather belt. It is believed that it was some kind of rock. The dead showed signs of severe violence. The lower and middle part of her face was shattered. There were no more remains of eyes, nose or ears to be seen. The scalp and hair had been separated from the skull. Part of it was between the corpse's neck and hand, and the rest of it was near the skull.

Findings

In 1977 an autopsy was carried out in the Reich Hospital in Copenhagen. Brain tissue, an ear and a flattened eyeball with lids were found. Her nutritional status was described as extraordinarily good and her skeleton showed no evidence of broken bones other than injuries to the skull. Only the dermis , choroid and an accumulation of pigment probably originating from the retina remained of the eye . Under the scanning electron microscope , wooden root remnants of ingrown Widertonmoos ( Politrichum ) were found inside the glass body . Shrunken erythrocytes could be detected in the veins of the eye and the ear . The epidermis has detached itself from the connective and fatty tissue on the head , and tender peat moss ( Sphagnum tenellum ) and pollen from cranberries or cranberries have penetrated into the space in between . These forensic examinations, which were carried out in 1984, did not provide any clear indication of the cause of death. Missing traces of bleeding in the tissues of the face, eyes, ear or windpipe indicate that the serious facial injuries did not occur until after her death. Based on the findings, her face must have been smashed shortly after her death, but not earlier than half an hour. Injury to the face by the peat cutter was ruled out because the body was lying on its stomach, face down. Otherwise no further lethal injuries or defensive injuries were visible on her arms. None of the possibilities - murder, suicide, accident, natural death - could be determined or excluded with certainty. It was no longer possible to clarify whether the woman was scalped during her lifetime or after her death, or whether the corpse was damaged by the peat cutters.

The determination of the age of the woman from Borremose at the time of her death caused difficulties in all previous investigations and so far could not provide any clear results. This is due to their state of preservation due to the effects of their long storage in the moor and the subsequent conservation on the remains of the woman. So far, five different attempts have been made to scientifically determine the age of women. The various examination methods used yielded results that differed widely from one another in a range from 16 to 73 years of age, with most of the agreements in a range around the age of 30. An analysis of growth marks on various parts of the skeleton from 1986 revealed that the woman was between 20 and 35 years old. The evaluation of a series of computed tomography images of the woman in 2008 was able to narrow down the period to 16 to 24 years of life.

A C-14 analysis of lung and heart tissue dates the corpse to the late Nordic Bronze Age , around 770 BC. In the peat layer surrounding the woman, about 80 years younger particles of bog coal were found, which were probably only washed into the bog after the woman was embedded.

More finds

In addition to Borremose's wife, the remains of other bog bodies were found in the same bog such as Borremose's husband and Borremose II's bog body , but these are not directly related to one another.

literature

  • Peter Vilhelm Glob : The sleepers in the moor . Winkler, Munich 1966 (Danish: Mosefolket . Translated by Thyra Dohrenburg).
  • Wijnand van der Sanden : Mummies from the moor. The prehistoric and protohistoric bog bodies from northwestern Europe . Drents Museum / Batavian Lion International, Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-6707-416-0 , p. 162 f . (Dutch: Vereeuwigd in het veen .).

Web links

Commons : Borremose bog bodies  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Christian Fischer: More Bog Bodies. In: The Tollund Man. Silkeborg Museum, accessed November 30, 2011 (English, with photo of the woman).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Vilhelm Glob : The sleepers in the moor . Winkler, Munich 1966, p. 75 (Danish: Mosefolket . Translated by Thyra Dohrenburg).
  2. ^ A b Chiara Villa, Maria Møller Rasmussen, Niels Lynnerup: Age estimation by 3D CT-scans of the Borremose Woman, a Danish bog body . In: Yearbook of Mummy Studies . No. 1 . Pfeil, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-89937-137-6 , pp. 165-169 (English).
  3. ↑ a b c d S. Ry Andersen: Ophthalmological findings in bog bodies . In: Clinical monthly sheets for ophthalmology . No. 197 . F. Enke, 1990, ISSN  0023-2165 , pp. 187-190 , doi : 10.1055 / s-2008-1046267 .
  4. ↑ kulturarv.dk
  5. ^ Christian Fischer: More Bog Bodies. (No longer available online.) In: The Tollund Man. Silkeborg Museum, archived from the original on April 2, 2012 ; accessed on November 30, 2011 (English).
  6. ^ Wijnand van der Sanden : Mummies from the moor - The prehistoric and early historical moor corpses from northwestern Europe . Drents Museum / Batavian Lion International, Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-6707-416-0 , p. 162 f . (Dutch: Vereeuwigd in het veen .).
  7. ^ Don Reginald Brothwell: The bog man and the archeology of people . Ed .: British Museum / Trustees. 4th edition. British Museum Publications, London 1991, ISBN 0-7141-1384-0 , pp. 16 .
personal data
SURNAME Wife of Borremose
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Borremose III
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bog corpse
DATE OF BIRTH 8th century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH around 770 BC Chr.
Place of death near Aars , Denmark